Tragic Raid
A raid goes awry and a 92 year old woman is shot and killed. It all seems a little confusing and it is important to wait until all the facts are in, but it seems like the police pretty much screwed up on this one.
The woman’s niece, Sarah Dozier, says that she bought her aunt a gun to protect herself and that her aunt had a permit for the gun. Relatives believe Johnston was frightened by the officers and opened fire.”They kicked her door down talking about drugs, there’s no drugs in that house. And they realize now, they’ve got the wrong house,” Dozier said. “I’m mad as hell.”
And well she should be. The police screwed up a little more also.
The woman’s niece, Dozier, who lives in Fayette County, said she had yet to be told by police that her aunt was dead even though police had called a news conference and talked to reporters outside Grady Memorial Hospital.
“I had to hear she had been shot on TV,” said Dozier, who said she wants a lot of questions answered and plans to hire a lawyer to get that information from police.
“As far as I’m concerned, they shot her down like a dog,” she said.
She was firing at them, but it seems like she was pretty scared by someone breaking in to her house. I would be also. Something is really wrong when these types of shootings (that is, police shooting civilians) are occurring fairly commonly. And I suspect that the ons falls to the police to make sure that they have the correct house and not to frighten 97 year old women who are alone in their house (the onus also falls to the police to tell the kin of the victim before they tell the media). The question I would have to ask is – did the officers feel that their lives werer threatened before they broke down the door or did they feel that the drug bust that they thought they were making was going to go south? Was there another way to secure the bust – like, say, surrounding the house? As I said, there are a lot of questions to be asked and one can only hope that the APD will cooperate to the fullest extent so that they can learn all of the lessons that need to be learned from this incident.
Agreed that it sounds like there are a lot of things still needing to be cleared up about this sad event. Besides the tragedy of it, I think it also highlights the ineptitude of these officers: Three of them were shot by a 92-year old woman? I think they might need to go back to cop school. Nothing about this incident engenders confidence in Atlanta law enforcement.
This incident is really sad and makes the APD look like amateurs. Did the police officers not survey the house to see if anything suspicious was going on before they kicked down the door of an elderly woman’s home? What evidence did they provide to convince the judge to issue the warrant? And, as Annie pointed out, how did three of them get shot by one untrained elderly woman? Imagine if it had been true criminals…. all of these officers would have been dead.
This is truly a tragic accident. One that should have been avoidable. Although… this is an unusual occurrence. Most, if not all, of the recent shootings by Atlanta area police officers have been justified. People need to realize that if you put yourself in a dangerous situation, then severe consequences may arise.