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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Arkansas Armed Robbers Use No-Knock FBI Warrant To Rob House |
| 2008-08-08 |
| (via Freep) 4 gunmen bust doors, yell ‘FBI,’ loot home Two men kicked in the front door, splintering it near the bolt-lock. Two more kicked in a side door. All four had guns. It was 3 a.m. “FBI! FBI!” the men shouted, one pulling what looked like a badge out of his shirt before stuffing it back in. “Where’s your money?” Lloyd McCuien lay facedown on the living-room floor of his Pulaski County house — off Arkansas 365 outside Maumelle and within sight of Interstate 40 — surrounded by seven family members. “It took me about 10 or 20 seconds to get my mind woken up,” McCuien, 42, said, “to realize that the real FBI didn’t wear a red bandanna over their face and a white T-shirt. These weren’t the FBI. They were self-employed.” And this was a robbery, one the Pulaski County sheriff’s office is investigating. The gunmen ransacked the house and searched room to room to gather all the occupants in one place, pulling some out of bed at gunpoint. One of the men was heavyset, McCuien said. The other three were skinny. “They sounded young,” Mc-Cuien said. A bear of a man — he looks uncannily like The Green Mile actor Michael Clarke Duncan — McCuien tried to steal an occasional peek to see if he could see a face. “Look down,” one gunman said. A few minutes later, he tried again. “I said look down!” the gunman said, following his remark with a smack on the back of Mc-Cuien’s head with a handgun. McCuien said he heard someone say pull out the duct tape. “Either they couldn’t get the tape to work or something because they decided not to tie us up,” he said. About then, a neighbor returned home, McCuien said, and the gunmen — organized to the point of choreography until then — started bickering. “One of them said it was time to go, time to go,” McCuien said. “But another one said no, he wasn’t leaving without taking something.” The gunmen grabbed an Xbox video-game console, baseball caps and clothes, a .45-caliber handgun and McCuien’s wallet. “They took my TV off the wall like they put it there,” he said. “Just real quick, smooth and easy.” A vehicle with a hatchback pulled up outside, and the men left in it. According to a sheriff’s office report, the robbers left behind the duct tape, a black leather bag and a glove. “They took my nephew’s clothes, man,” McCuien said. “The TV I understand. Plasma, 42-inch. But his clothes? What are they going to do with those? Wear them?” McCuien said he believes his house was targeted specifically, though he doesn’t know the reason. “I don’t know exactly why or by who, but somebody who knows somebody or somebody who’s somebody’s cousin thought we had something in here they wanted,” he said. “This kind of thing doesn’t really happen around here.” Sheriff ’s office spokesman John Rehrauer concurred, saying violent acts are unusual in that area. The sheriff’s office does not keep track of home-invasion robberies, Rehrauer said, but crime statistics kept by the agency showed 15 robberies of people in Pulaski County in 2008 through June, a decrease of seven from the same period a year earlier. FBI special agent Steve Frazier, spokesman for the agency’s Little Rock field office, said he had not been notified of any possible impersonations of bureau personnel. After the gunmen left, McCuien said, he called 911. The respondents “were real law enforcement this time — uniforms, patrol cars, everything,” he said. Deputies had made no arrests by late Thursday. McCuien said his house on Ingram Road was recently remodeled, but he didn’t suspect any of the white and Hispanic crew that worked on it. “No, man, these were all brothers who came up in here this morning,” he said. “Sorry to say.” And, he said, he tends not to keep large amounts of cash in his house. “Where would I get it?” he asked. “I’m out of work right now, just like almost everybody else, it seems. I have no idea why somebody thought I was rich.” McCuien said he grew up in the same neighborhood of calm and winding, sidewalkless roads, old and moldering mobile homes, and clean, newer brick houses on large lots. He lived in Phoenix for 11 years, he said, owning a dumptruck firm. He moved back about six years ago, he said, after his father had a stroke. He stayed after a sister got sick, and when she died, he moved into her house. “This is the first I’ve heard of something like this happening around here,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking I’d make history in this neighborhood.” |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #2 Shame when the cops and criminals are indistinguishable. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2008-08-08 13:51 |
| #1 An interesting comment by the original poster is that he has both a Federal Firearms License (FFL), and an SOT, or Federal Machine Gun License, and has notified local and local-federal law enforcement organizations that if they need to serve a warrant on his house, it had either be by prior arrangement or a "knock" warrant. Otherwise, if someone busts through his door, they could be met with belt-fed machine gun fire. Kind of puts a whole new twist on the use of the "no-knock warrant". |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-08-08 13:09 |