Knocking on a door and announcing you are police and have a warrant during 6 AM and 10 PM is exactly what the law requires. Shooting at the police is stupid. And illegal.
It's also speculation to assume that the warrant wasn't executed in a way that gave him reasonable cause to believe this was a home invasion - rather than police executing a warrant in a manner that complied with existing case law.
Any relevant information from case law on HOW that warrant should be executed? Exigent circumstances and giving the occupants of the home reasonable time and opportunity to lawfully comply?
Any views on approaching this as a warrant with the suspect having firearms by deciding that everyone in the 10+ agents involved would NOT wear their bodycams as regulations have required for over a decade? He's dead... any of the agents being disciplines for refusing to follow regulations?
Just a uniform coincidental accident by every one of the agents involved that not one was wearing their body cam despite wearing all their battle rattle? Was that to make all the agents involved somehow or other safer? Rather than making sure there wouldn't be any video record of whatever happened and how they acted when they executed the warrant?
Is it stupid - but legal and more dangerous - to have a potentially confrontational warrant execution with a suspect while he's in his home at oh-dark-thirty, rather than positioning yourselves outside his home where you can approach him from several different sides when he comes out during the day to go to work, get a coffee, mow the lawn, etc?
You can manage 10+ agents to make a raid in the dark - but can't manage to round up the same number of agents (or more likely half that number), to walk up to him from different directions from cover when he comes out of his house in the daylight? Had enough time to plan for a ten man raid, but not enough time to plan to arrest him at work while others then served the warrant at his house?
Why is it better to execute a warrant as they did here, in the dark, and the necessity of covering the security camera so those inside couldn't see on the monitor that you were dressed as police - if they actually did announce they were police with a warrant with time to respond, before smashing the door? The wife says she heard nothing but crashing before the gunfire.
How was that better and safer for all concerned rather than confronting the suspect outside his home in the open and in daylight, dressed and armed in the same manner? Where he'd have a choice - not a chance.
Its been a long time since I was serving warrants, but we wouldn't have even dreamed of attempting this way of serving this warrant on this particular suspect in this manner. With this particular guy, with these charges, our scalps would have been hanging from somebody's office door if we had.
Maybe somebody with a background like drug cartels, biker gangs, escaped violent criminals, armed robbers, etc... but this guy?
In what little we can see concerning this, there were no circumstances that justify it. For one thing, detaining him somewhere outside his home, showing him the warrant and then executing that warrant also prevents him from destroying any evidence while at the same time minimizing the potential for a lethal confrontation, which is exactly what happened after they did it this way. They killed their bad guy - but they also got one of theirs wounded. That's a win... apparently.
And what if the manner that the warrant was served left this suspect with reasonable justification to fear a home invasion? Dark of night, his door security camera he sees has been deliberately disabled, and somebody who may or may not be shouting 'police' is at the same time trying to crash through his door? The police or gang bangers most likely to operate like that at oh-dark-thirty in the morning?
It may well have been legal other than deliberately refusing to wear the mandated body cams to record their actions during the raid, but doing this in such an unnecessarily provocative and dangerous manner was beyond stupid.
Aside from killing the suspect, by not confronting him outside the home at a time and place of their choosing, they ended up with him being able to fire from inside his home and hit one of the ATF outside his home in the dark.
Worst. Way. Possible. Legal or not.
This is becoming a common theme in federal law enforcement, and that is not a positive for the general law enforcement profession; it is the complete opposite.
