The Raid on Mayor Cheye Calvo's Home

Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, was stirring her spaghetti sauce when suddenly she saw armed, masked men in black swarming across their backyard.  One of the men saw her and pointed his high-powered assault weapon directly at her through the window.  She screamed.  Suddenly the front door shattered, and men in black burst into the house.

Payton, one of the family’s two black Labrador Retrievers, was lying stretched out on the living room floor.  As he turned his head towards the door, the terrified Georgia watched as the men shot him in the face multiple times.  The other family dog, Chase, ran into the dining room in an attempt to escape from the screaming men, but they rushed the dining room from all directions and shot him also.

Someone pushed Georgia face-down on the ground and put a gun to her head.  They bound her hands behind her and started screaming “Where are they?”  She had no idea what they were talking about, and shut her eyes, thinking they were going to shoot her next.

Upstairs, 37-year-old Cheye Calvo was getting dressed for a community meeting when he heard the shouting and gunfire.  He fell to his bedroom floor.  When he heard the men ordered to come upstairs, he called out ”I’m up here.  Please don’t shoot.  Please don’t shoot!”

They told him to come downstairs.  He looked down the staircase into the barrels of two shotguns pointed at him.  Gingerly, he walked slowly down his staircase backwards, clad only in his boxer shorts.  When he neared the bottom, someone led him the rest of the way down, pulled his hands behind his back, and bound his wrists very tightly.

Cheye saw Georgia on the kitchen floor with a man holding a gun against her head.  Then he saw his beloved dog, Payton, slumped on the living room floor in a huge puddle of blood.  As he knelt on the floor, he could hear his house being ransacked top to bottom.  And he struggled to try to figure out what they could possibly own that was worth stealing.

As time passed, Cheye could see people gathering on his front lawn, including some wearing official-looking jackets.  Through his fear and his sorrow, Cheye tried to make sense of what was happening.  He thought, “if this were a home invasion, people wouldn’t just be standing out there on the lawn.  They’d be hiding.  Does that mean these men could be law enforcement?  Whatever for?”

Meanwhile, the crowd on the lawn was growing.  Pvt. Amir Johnson, a Berwyn Heights police officer, was on patrol when he saw officers in tactical uniforms coming out of his mayor’s house.  One of the Prince George’s County officers told him, “The guy in there is crazy.  He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights”.  When Johnson told him, “That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights”, the detective looked shocked.

Cheye started asking questions.  He had to ask several times “Do you have a search warrant?” before finally being told “it’s en route”.  Eventually one of the men in black pointed to the big white box addressed to Trinity that had been delivered earlier and asked threateningly, “Do you know what is in this box?”

“A box?”, Cheye thought.  “This is about a box?”

45 minutes after the raid had started, Cheye’s wife arrived home.  Seeing the road jammed with police vehicles, Trinity assumed her house had been robbed.  “Is my husband OK?  Is my mom OK?” she frantically asked the Berwyn Heights detective who met her at the gate.  After being assured they were in the house, she realized that it was too quiet.  There were no dogs barking.  She asked about Payton and Chase, and collapsed against the detective’s chest when told they were dead.

Eventually an officer came and led her to her back door.  She tried to go in the house to find her husband and mother, but was overwhelmed by the blood — blood pooled by the back door, blood tracked all over the house by the SWAT team, blood everywhere.  She backed out and sat in a daze on the steps, thinking “I’m never going to be able to live here again”.

The Prince George’s County Police Department had intercepted a package addressed to Trinity containing 32 pounds of marijuana and delivered it to the house earlier that evening.  But despite it being common knowledge among narcotics officers that criminals were sending drugs to innocent people in the hopes of grabbing the packages before they got home, nobody bothered to do even the most basic background research into the Calvo’s before invading their house.

When animal control officers came to take Payton’s and Chase’s bodies away, Cheye broke down.  “I roared,” Cheye later recalled.  “I broke down sobbing.  Payton was the sweetest, most wonderful dog I had ever known.  Our lives revolved around our two dogs.  They were our kids”.

The SWAT team spent almost four hours ransacking the house.  They found no sign of drugs, no guns, no stacks of cash, not even a single rolling paper.  It took hours before someone figured out how to cut the tight handcuffs off Cheye and Georgia.  In the end, after threatening that the family could still be hauled into jail, the SWAT team finally left.

All three family members were in shock.  In fact, Georgia was so hysterical she could barely speak.  With no way to lock their front door, fear of a drug dealer missing his marijuana, and a totally destroyed house, no one slept that night.

Picking Up the Pieces

By the next morning, Cheye realized that the doubts cast by the raid could ruin their lives.  Cheye’s boss suggested that he be proactive in reaching out to the media and, since innocent people go to jail all the time, that he get a good lawyer.   As Cheye, Trinity and Georgia tried to deal with their grief, the Berwyn Heights community reached out to them.  Among many other acts of kindness, a memorial was held for Payton and Chase.

Seventy-one hours after the raid, Cheye was finally provided with the search warrant which supposedly gave the police the justification for their actions.   Shockingly, he discovered that it was not the no-knock warrant required to forcefully enter someone’s house.  Instead, the judge had approved a standard search warrant designed to be handed to someone at their front door.

Cheye’s anger reached the boiling point as he watched a news conference held more than a week after the raid by Prince George’s Police Chief Melvin C. High and Sheriff Michael Jackson.  While the police officers announced the arrest of two men for shipping packages of marijuana to unsuspecting recipients, they refused to apologize to Cheye’s family or to unequivocally declare their innocence.

The Search for Justice

The following morning, Cheye held a press conference on his front lawn, Trinity sobbing by his side.  As word spread about their traumatic experience, Cheye began to hear from many others with similar stories.  And he realized that this was no longer just about him, his wife and his mother-in-law.  It was his duty to do everything in his power to try to stop this from happening to another innocent family.

To combat the secrecy surrounding SWAT raids, Cheye has been working with sympathetic legislators in Maryland to pass a law requiring monthly reporting of the number of SWAT team deployments and their results to the Attorney General.  Once this data is available, it is anticipated that the police will recognize that SWAT teams are regularly being used inappropriately in some counties and will implement standards for their use.  If this does not occur, additional legislation may be required.

Since this is not a problem limited to Maryland, Cheye is also working with other legislators in other states to introduce similar legislation.

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