The Baby-Burning Stormtroopers of Habersham County, Georgia

by William Norman Grigg
Jun. 03, 2014

“I stand behind what our team did,” insists Habersham, Georgia County Sheriff Joey Terrell, referring to a 3:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which a 19-month-old child was severely burned by a flash-bang grenade. “There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to look at,” continued the sheriff, relaying the conclusions of the County DA’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “Bad things can happen. That’s just the world we live in.”

The world Terrell inhabits is one in which police – acting as righteousness incarnate – kick in doors at 3:00 am and hurl incendiary devices into homes in order to arrest people on suspicion of non-violent drug offenses. If an infant receives life-altering burns as a result of that incursion, this can't be laid at the jackbooted feet of his officers, the sheriff maintains. The fault resides with the alleged drug dealers, whom the sheriff denounced as people “who want to do the domestic terrorism and sell dope and make the money.”

An unnamed petty criminal who acted as an informant told Terrell’s task force that drug commerce had occurred at the targeted residence in Cornelia, and that armed men were acting as “guards.” However, the stormtroopers found no drugs in the house. The suspect they sought wasn’t present when the raiders kicked in the door. Nineteen-month-old Boukham “Bou-Bou” Phonesavankh and his parents were visiting from Wisconsin after their own home had been burned down.

The informant whose “controlled buy” provided the pretext for the subsequent atrocity supposedly reported that there were no children at the residence. Having lost their home in Wisconsin in a fire, the family was in Cornelia visiting relatives in the hope of rebuilding their lives – only to find themselves on the receiving end of an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

“Everyone’s sleeping,” recalled Alecia Phonesavanh, the mother of the infant victim, describing her family’s encounter with Terrell’s ministering angels of divine justice. “There’s a loud bang and a bright light. The cops threw that grenade in the door without looking first, and it landed right in the playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face.”

The Sheriff has indicated that any criminal charges arising from the burning of the infant would be added to the indictment against the alleged drug dealer. He has also insinuated that the parents are responsible for the near-fatal injuries suffered by their baby. This is in keeping with the “Collateral Murder” model of deflected responsibility: When the Regime’s hired killers slaughter or mutilate children, it’s the fault of the parents for living in a targeted neighborhood.

Terrell's pious condemnation of drug-derived profits conceals his role as a kingpin in a criminal syndicate that exists in murderous symbiosis with Georgia's criminal underworld: Sheriff Terrell is the key figure in the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team (NCIS), a federally funded task force that prowls a three-county region in search of cash and property that can be seized in the name of “asset forfeiture.”

Like other federally funded einsatzgruppen of its kind, the NCIS liaises with small-caliber criminals, such as the “confidential informant” who allegedly conducted a meth transaction at the home where Terrell's minions later carried out the raid. Funding for the NCIS comes from a federal Byrne Grant, which is administered by the Habersham County Commissioners' office.

Habersham, along with Stephens County Sheriff Randy Shirley, is responsible for hiring, training, and deploying undercover NCIS officers, and bears command responsibility for the actions of the task force's tactical team. When the raiders carried out the 3:00 am raid in which 19-month-old “Bou-Bou” was nearly burned to death – the grenade “blew open his face and chest,” his anguished mother recalled – they acted as extensions of his will, and he shares culpability for their crimes.

In his first public comments following the attack that nearly killed Bou-Bou, Sheriff Terrell emphasized that the County DA and Georgia Bureau of Investigation had already “investigated” the incident and ruled that the actions of the SWAT team were “justified.” While the sheriff offered perfunctory and grudging expressions of sympathy for the infant victim and his family (“I don’t think [the burns] cover a significant amount of the face or the chest,” Terrell said of an infant who was in a medically induced coma), he described in detail the trauma he insists was suffered by his stormtroopers, the people he obviously considers the real victims.

The officer who threw the grenade “is basically upside down,” relates the sheriff. “He’s gone and talked to his pastor, trying to get some counseling and some debriefing just to help him get through what has happened.” If that pastor is a man of God, rather than an agent of Leviathan, he will prescribe abject repentance in sackcloth and ashes.

Matt Wurtz, the on-site commander of the goon squad that raided the home, was similarly devastated, Terrell continues, but in a “trembling” voice expressed his determination to continue kicking in doors at 3:00 a.m. “because children are getting involved in situations they don’t need to be.”

That’s right: The on-site commander whose subordinates nearly burned a child to death in a raid the likes of which the Gestapo might have regarded excessive did it For The Children.

Sheriff Terrell likewise remains committed to pursuing the path of righteousness:

"We’re called for a purpose. The members of this team want to be here… We’re getting more and more information about children, 14-15 years of age, getting into methamphetamine. Who is going to stand up for them? Who is going to do the right thing? We are! We are! And we are not going to stop what we do.”

One wonders if the “information” to which Sheriff Terrell refers is as reliable as that provided by the “confidential informant” who told police that there were no children at the home prior to the SWAT raid.

Although Bou-Bou's prospects for survival are improving, it's quite likely he will be permanently disfigured as a result of the ministrations he received from Terrell's angelic emissaries of justice. The son of former Livonia, Georgia resident Jonathan Ayers, however, suffered an injury that cannot be repaired: He hadn't been born when NCIS officers murdered his father, a 28-year-old Baptist minister, on September 1, 2009.

Ayers was shot and killed by Officer Billy Shane Harrison outside a convenience store in Toccoa, Georgia. Harrison was one of three undercover NCIS operatives who pulled up in an unmarked black SUV and – with guns drawn – surrounded Ayers’ vehicle after the pastor had made a withdrawal at a nearby ATM. The undercover cops looked like private sector thugs, and Ayers understandably thought he was dealing with carjackers His dying words at a local hospital made it clear that he didn’t know that the gun-wielding, disreputable figures who accosted him belonged to a criminal caste that is protected by “qualified immunity.”

Ayers, in a panic, hit the gas, and his vehicle made brief and harmless contact with Officer Chance Oxner. Harrison later claimed that he opened fire to protect his partner in state-sanctioned crime, but this doesn’t explain why he continued firing once Ayers had driven away and the supposed threat had ended.

The victim wasn’t aware that just a few hours earlier, Oxner – who had been hired by Sheriff Terrell – had conducted a $50 drug transaction with a woman named Kayla Barrett, a prostitute and alleged drug dealer. Ayers had been observed giving Barrett money and a ride to the extended-stay hotel where she lived with her boyfriend.

The pastor’s family and close friends insist that Ayers was ministering to the prostitute; his detractors claimed that those roles were reversed. In either case, Ayers wasn’t a criminal suspect. The officers claimed that their intent in approaching him at the gas station was to question him about Barrett, but that doesn’t explain why they swarmed him with their guns drawn.

As in the case of the recent atrocity in Cornelia, the killing of Ayers was the subject of a perfunctory internal investigation that exonerated the officers. The victim’s widow, Abigail Ayers, filed a lawsuit, and Harrison – along with sheriffs Terrell and Shirley – moved for summary judgment on the basis of “qualified immunity.”

In February of last year, a federal judge ruled that Harrison and his comrades had “no probable cause to believe Ayers had committed a crime when Officer Harrison first approached Ayers’s car with his gun drawn,” which means that the use of deadly force could not be considered “objectively reasonable.” In February of this year, a federal court awarded Abigail and her son more than $2 million for the unlawful killing of Jonathan by Harrison.

Jonathan Ayers died believing that he was a victim of an attempted armed robbery. He was correct. The behavior of Harrison and his comrades was illegal even under the emancipated definitions of “lawful” conduct that govern the state’s plunderbund: At the time of the shooting, the lawsuit pointed out, Harrison “was not authorized under Georgia law to perform the duties of a law enforcement officer and had no legal right to demand [Ayers’s] compliance with his directives.”

Harrison had not completed a mandatory course of instruction on firearms and the use of deadly force. In addition, he was “known to the Mountain Judicial Circuit NCIS and Sheriff Shirley to have illegally used marijuana on multiple occasions and was further known to have committed acts of dishonesty including stealing from a prior employer,” reports the lawsuit. Officer Oxner “had been convicted of the criminal offense of Theft by Taking and had a reported history of alcohol abuse and suspected (by the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office) participation in illegal drug activities.”

Officer Kyle Brandt, the supervisor on the scene when Ayers was murdered, was aware of the dubious background of his underlings. In fact, he had previously worked with Harrison and was the one who recommended him to Sheriff Shirley as a member of the NCIS undercover task force. Media attention generated by Abigail Ayers’ lawsuit shamed the GBI – which had initially performed the expected cover-up of the crime -- into conducting an actual investigation. This resulted in the arrest of Lt. Edwin Wilson of the Stephens County Sheriff’s Office, who falsified Harrison’s training records.

Like others engaged in the cynical exercise called the “War on Drugs,” Sheriff Terrell likes to pretend that he and his comrades areseeking an end to the narcotics trade. The unadorned truth is that his narco-stormtroopers subsist on narcotics proceeds, and their federal Memorandum of Understanding – a species of Pirate’s Constitution – assumes that the “war” in which they are engaged will carry on in perpetuity.

The MOU specifies that the federal Byrne Grant will pay one hundred percent of “commander salaries” for the NCIS, and that the team itself “will pay 100% of [its] Operational Expenses from previously seized funds.” Under its deal with the Feds, the NCIS will receive “100% of revenues generated” though asset forfeiture and property confiscation. This provides the task force’s criminally inclined rank-and-file with an incentive to stage sting operations, “pretext stops,” and door-kicks in order to find money and property they can steal.

For their part, the task force commanders are instructed that “continued sustainability beyond grant funding is a basis for initial grant fund approval.” In other words: Your federally guaranteed salaries depend on the productivity of the predators under your command.

According to the Institute for Justice, “Georgia has some of the nation’s worst civil forfeiture laws,” and its law enforcement agencies are among the most aggressive in the entire soyuz in practicing that form of state-sanctioned robbery.

Not surprisingly, police in Georgia are also among the worst with respect to record-keeping and public reporting of seizures. Reports on forfeiture proceeds typically “lack even basic details necessary for proper public oversight, such as what was taken and when, how much it was worth and what was done with the proceeds.”

In 1993, Georgia law enforcement agencies took in $6 million in civil forfeiture proceeds. In 2003 – the last year for which comprehensive accounting figures were available – that amount had increased to $33 million.

It should be recalled that Sheriff Terrell described drug dealers as people who “who want to do the domestic terrorism and sell dope and make the money.” His NCIS task force is a murderous, tax-subsidized, predatory criminal clique composed of violent, addiction-prone men who are immeasurably more dangerous than the drug dealers they pursue. Whatever else can truthfully be said about narcotics dealers in Georgia, they don’t kick in doors at 3:00 am and burn infants in their cribs.
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William Norman Grigg publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.