BOTCHED SWAT RAID LEAVES FAMILY WITH $1 MILLION HOSPITAL BILL

Toddler horribly disfigured during botched Georgia SWAT raid when struck in face by flash-bang grenade

When the Phonesavanh family’s Wisconsin home burned down, Bounkham, his wife Alecia and their four children were forced to move in temporarily with his sister in Cornelia, Georgia. Bounkham’s sister had converted her garage into a bedroom for the family to stay there.

Based on an informant’s claim that 30-year-old Wanis Thonetheva, Bounkham’s nephew, was selling meth at his mother’s house, narcotic officers obtained a ‘no-knock’ warrant to search the house. At 2 a.m. on May 28, a Habersham County SWAT team stormed the residence without warning. During the raid, one of the cops tossed a flash-bang grenade into the play pen where 19-month-old Bounkham ‘Bou Bou’ Phonesavanh Jr. was sleeping.

The explosion awakened the parents. They saw an officer rush out of the room with Bou Bou in his arms. When Bounkham spotted blood in the play pen he insisted on seeing the toddler. He was told to stay put and threatened with arrest. They cops said that the blood came from a broken tooth. The family was held for two hours before they were allowed to go to the hospital to check on their son.

Bou Bou was critically injured with serious burns to his face and body and a collapsed lung. The toddler spent five weeks in a medically-induced coma and has had numerous surgeries to repair the disfigurement he suffered. The hospital bills thus far exceed $1 million and Bou Bou still requires further treatment.

The Phonesavanhs claim that they never saw the nephew during the two months they stayed at the Cornelia residence. Thonetheva was arrested elsewhere a few hours later. He pled guilty to selling meth and received a 10-year prison sentence.

A grand jury refused to indict any of the officers, but according to WGCL-TV, it did find that “the drug investigation leading to the raid was hurried and sloppy, saying the tragedy happened, in part, because of well-intentioned people in too big of a hurry to consider the consequences of their actions.”

The officer who made out the search warrant affidavit and the judge who issued the warrant both resigned after the raid and the SWAT team was disbanded.

The Phonesavanhs say they have no hope of paying the hospital bills and claim they were never in debt prior to the botched raid. Habersham County has refused to compensate them for Bou Bou’s hospital treatment. The county is protected by a Georgia state ‘gratuity’ law that keeps local governments from having to pay for any damages. Their only recourse is a civil lawsuit.

John Nelson, the founder of the SWAT concept, once confided in me that he was very upset with the proliferation of SWAT teams. John, a very close buddy, told me he feared something like this was bound to happen when small police agencies formed their own SWAT teams.