Demarkus PeeplesAround noon on Tuesday, Dec. 2, [Demarkus] Peeples was watching TV at home when he heard a knock at the front door. When he looked out the door’s top window, he saw a group of men standing on his porch wearing jeans and T-shirts, a couple of them looking a little ratty. To get a better look, he went to a side window and peeked through the drawn blinds. “Honestly, they looked like they were transients,” he said. The men, it ends up, were undercover narcotics officers who were there on a complaint about drug activity at that address—Peeples was later told that it had to do with a “chemical smell.” Peeples said the men—he estimates there were six—never announced who they were.
Peeples waited until they circled back to the front of his house, at which point he opened his back door to investigate. That’s when his dog, a three-year-old Staffy named Eygpt ran out. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, except that one of the police officers had left the backyard gate open. The dog ran out, and down Peeple’s driveway toward the officers, at which point they shot it three times. Even the police concede the dog never attacked. It only gets worse from there. The police then arrested Peeples on the charge of assault with a deadly weapon—the weapon being his now dying dog. Peeples says they then euthanized his dog, despite his explicit instructions not to.
“Do not kill my dog; do everything you can to save my dog,” he remembers yelling. When he saw Chris Victor, his neighbor, he asked him to make sure Egypt was kept alive. Victor said he called animal control to let them know he’d cover any cost for Egypt’s care, but by the time his call got through, Egypt had been euthanized. DeSousa said the dog was put down immediately after arriving. The police didn’t find the meth lab they were presumably looking for. They did apparently find a misdemeanor amount of marijuana in Peeple’s garage—marijuana that, according to the article, was “so old that it disintegrated upon contact.”
Maybe when the city gets tired of lawsuits, this crap will end.
Thanks to Mister Justin
You know we always talk about the “slippery slope” Well guess what, we are on that slope. We can’t blame the poor cops.
They are just trying to follow the law. Until such time as us citizens DEMAND that the idiots who write the laws show some common sense we are stuck with this kind of crap.
Police will do whatever they are allowed to do, so the only way to control them is to limit what they can and will do.
I am old enough to remember the “war on poverty”, the “war on illiteracy”, the war on drugs, the “war on terrorism”, etc. every time we have a war on anything we get this stupidity.
Let’s start letting everyone go to hell in their own hand basket and save our POLICE for stuff that is important. REMEMBER Larceny, Kidnapping, Assault, Murder, Robbery, and all that stuff that were REAL crime.
Cop-friendly juries will always exonerate the corrupt cops. Why should they fear the citizen?
So gquaglia,
Don’t you think the police need a damn good reason for opening up your gate and looking around your yard? Don’t you think that you might be a little cautious of opening the door to a group of f’n strange men? Why is it that police dogs are more valuable than someone’s protective and loyal pet? If they didn’t have a search warrant, they were in the WRONG! Plain and simple. Get some better evidence before you act like a bunch of idiots. Oh and they found some pot that “disintegrated” upon touching… watch out now! He is such a bad guy that he lets his stash sit around until it is un-smokeable! What a gangster!
Just wait until your ass is on the wrong side of the police thanks to some false information! My stepfather was close to being shot (officer’s words) while trying to protect us with his own gun when some lunatic was trying to bust down our front door. The police dispatcher f’d up big time and relayed that it was a hostage situation. Nothing like being a child and having to walk out with your hands up and having shotguns pointed at you. That happened in California too.
So the fact that they can screw up on non-emergency situations doesn’t bode well for their department. When these things happen, someone needs to take responsibility and that is exactly what they should do for killing his dog and acting irresponsibly on false information.
Sounds pretty familiar to there being no weapons of mass destruction…