In July 2008, a package containing 32 pounds of marijuana was sent to a house in Berwyn Heights, Maryland. The house belonged to the town's mayor, Cheye Calvo, and his wife, Trinity Tomsic. Two black Labrador retrievers lived there with them.
Police later said they believed the delivery was part of a scheme in which smugglers ship packages to the homes of unsuspecting recipients and have someone else collect them shortly after they arrive, the Associated Press reported. Calvo and his family were cleared of any wrongdoing.
Before that happened, a SWAT team from the Prince George's County Sheriff's Office, assisting county narcotics officers, raided the house. Both Labradors were shot to death. In the lawsuit Calvo later filed against the county, he alleged that the failure to knock or announce entry, the killing of the dogs and the "degrading detention" of himself and his mother-in-law were the "direct and proximate result of a rogue, paramilitary culture" within the sheriff's department, and that the family had suffered physically, psychologically and emotionally. "It was, by far the most tragic event in our lives," Calvo said in January 2011.
Writing in The Washington Post in 2014, Radley Balko described the raid as a mistaken one and wrote that although Prince George's County officials eventually acknowledged that they had raided the wrong house, they "never wavered from the position that killing the dogs was the right thing to do."
The sheriff's office had reached that conclusion early. An internal review found that the deputies acted appropriately and that the search warrant had been executed lawfully. Sheriff Melvin High said in 2011 that "as the former chief of police, I always expressed regret that the Calvos were victims of criminal enterprise," and that the office was "reviewing all policies and procedures against best practice standards," with SWAT operations among the areas under review.
County police, a separate agency, described changes of their own: more vigorous supervisory review of search warrants and additional steps to verify who lives at an address, said spokesman Maj. Andy Ellis. He also defended the underlying practice. In narcotics cases, Ellis said, the default is to send a tactical team, because the potential for violence is higher and firearms are often recovered. "It only makes sense for us to send in our most experienced teams," he said. "We would be asking for trouble if we were to just send any police officer in." That default — a heavily armed entry as the routine tool for a drug warrant, rather than the exception — is the policy that sent a tactical team through the door of a house whose residents were later cleared of any wrongdoing.
Ellis said the use of sheriff's office SWAT officers on a county narcotics warrant was a rare arrangement, and that county police had not used the sheriff's office to serve any search warrants since.
No discipline of any deputy was reported. In January 2011, the county began settling Calvo's lawsuit, in a deal he said would include both money and reforms to how SWAT teams are deployed; the AP reported that the settlement's details were not disclosed. A settlement is a payment, not a finding: no court ruled on the raid, and the county admitted nothing. The most durable consequence came from the legislature. Under a 2009 Maryland law prompted by this raid, agencies must report SWAT deployments — and every time a SWAT team injures or kills a pet. The internal finding that the deputies acted appropriately was never disturbed.