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A week out of hell -
My son latest victim of Rancid City Police Brutality
A column
By Hazel Bonner
January 19 2004
The past week started with the death of my mother at 10:40 p.m. Sunday, January 11. Too many of you have planned funerals for your parents to require explanation of the pain caused by that. I lost my mother who was one of my four best friends. The other three are my children.
On Tuesday, my oldest daughter, here from Virginia, and my youngest daughter and I planned to meet at the nursing home where my mother resided to go through her stuff and clean out her room. My youngest daughter did not show up.
We found out later that two Rapid City detectives had detained her just as she was leaving to meet us. Pennington County Housing manages the moderate-income complex where she lives. She works at Regional Hospital pharmacy, and has for the past six years.
The detectives told her they had a complaint of large amounts of a narcotic cough medicine in her home. She had had an inspection and some maintenance earlier that day.
She was stunned and said that she has a bottle of Nyquil in her room and her son probably has one in his room. When one of the detectives showed with his hands the size of the bottles, a light came on.
Since starting to work in the pharmacy, she had cleaned out and taken home opaque brown gallon bottles used for cough medicine containing codeine to line her stairs. The stairs have probably been fully lined with them for more that a year. Housing personnel have commented on them and she has explained where they came from. She now has 12 of those gallon jars in her house.
She asked the detective to check for any of the medicine in the bottles and to call her supervisor. They did neither. Suddenly during the week my mother died and we are preparing for her funeral, they decide to investigate this? Perhaps not a coincidence? I understand it is routine for housing maintenance and inspectors to call in cops. We truly are in a police state aren’t we, especially if we are poor? There is no right to privacy in our own homes.
My son is a drug addict and sometimes when he is high does things that make me believe I do not know him. I have never seen him get violent even when he is high. He seems to not cross that line. The pain of living with an addicted adult son or daughter also hardly requires explanation, because too many of you have been or are going through it. I still dream of a day when our troubled young men and women receive help, instead a beating by police or dying on the wrong end of a policeman’s gun.
I found out on January 17 in the morning that he was on a short list of suspects for the casino robber last thursday. Based on the physical description it might have been him. However based on the detailed description given me by a person who has seen the video, I do not believe it is him. I think perhaps the cops have set him up for this crime. Remember the sexual contact with a child charges from last January? This may be a similar form of harassment. Based on my own investigation since that time, I am quickly concluding that Richard has been set up to take the fall for this crime.
A detective went to my daughter’s home here Saturday morning while she was at work and questioned her son, a minor, about Richard. He left a business card with his name printed on it and Detective DeGroot’s name handwritten on the back. She complained about them not allowing her to be present and they told her they don’t have to. Again, the law doesn’t apply if your are poor and brown skinned.
Early Saturday afternoon friends of Richard’s called me and told me that they had watched a number of cops beat the crap out of Richard on their lawn a short time earlier. The police had hauled Richard off to jail more than a half hour before they reached me by phone. He had not yet arrived in jail but I was able to determine that he was in the emergency room being treated for injuries received at the hands of the cops. I went there and insisted on being allowed to go back where he was being treated.
He is being held in jail without bond pending his initial appearance on Monday, January 19. The state will probably request that the bond remain no bond or a very high bond. Richard, of course will speak for himself.
I received three calls on Saturday from a confidential informant (CI) trying to convince me that it was Richard who robbed the Casino. She claims to have hard evidence that could convict Richard of the robbery. During all three calls she tried to get me to say that she should dispose of that evidence I know the first call was a surveillance call. Even though I know the police will go to any length to convict him and send him up for life, I did not and never wood tell her to dispose of the evidence, if she even has it. She called me again on Sunday, again reminding me that she has the evidence but trying to convince me that she is not working with the cops. I don’t buy it.
I did tell her that investigators try to get people to say what they want to hear, especially when they are intent on convicting a person, and not necessarily solving the crime. I believe that all they have is the statement of a convicted drug dealer who is also a CI and the calls were meant to pull me into this mess. I would never advise a witness to lie in an investigation or destroy evidence. I urged her to tell the absolute truth if she chooses to talk to them and not to lie for Richard or for the state. That’s a new concept for prosecutions, isn’t it? I still dream that our court system will become a system for justice.
If Richard is guilty of this crime, he needs to do the time. I am more convinced than ever following the four phone calls that the cops set up Richard for this crime because they have targeted him since his first arrest at the age of 18.
When I saw my son on the exam table in the ER, in metal handcuffs, I reminded him that there are no friends in the drug world. I told him to cooperate and not to give them any reason to hurt him more. The cop told me that he had not been Mirandized nor had he been arrested. He could not tell me what he was charged with – Richard did not know. He did say he had a warrant for an unpaid fine. Cops have a strange view of when a person is under arrest – if you’re in the presence of law enforcement and not free to leave you are being detained.
When I visited him in jail I urged him to use this time to rest, eat regularly and to gain strength for a fight for his life. I also told him to make the most of his stay at the Holloway Inn.
So the second week of 2004 saw me lose my dear sweet mother, my baby girl be interrogated about large amounts of narcotic cough medicine in her home and my only son beat up by the cops and charged with an armed robbery. Guess this does not bode well for my dreams for 2004. I will continue to hold those dreams, however, because I remain an impossible dreamer.
Bonner is a free lance writer who writes from her home. She can be reached electronically at hbonpidge1 at hotmail.com; by phone at (605)343-4467; or by mail at PO Box 3712, Rapid City, SD 55709-3712.
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