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Ex-chief sought by drug agents
(by Dave Lange - February 18, 2009)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Ex-chief sought by drug agents
My father-in-law is not a fugitive from the law. But he was holed up at my house in Geauga County on a recent Friday evening when two dark SUVs slipped into his Maple Heights driveway and two rugged dudes wearing Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department vests stepped out.
According to a neighbor who called to apprise us of the alarming situation, the resolute law enforcers rapped on the door like characters from a 1940s newsreel, peered into the windows of the house and garage and posted an ominous notice before vanishing into the night.
We could only imagine what might have occurred if my wife's 80-year-old dad, a retired East Cleveland deputy fire chief, had been home at the time. Younger men have suffered heart attacks from less intimidating intrusions. Some people of that age are beset by varying degrees of dementia, and, in some neighborhoods, they keep firearms in their homes for self-protection.
So what heinous crime was my father-in-law suspected of by the law-enforcement agency whose primary responsibility is to run the county jail? And why would the sheriff's department dispatch a pair of agents out to Maple Heights, which has a perfectly competent police department of its own to handle ordinary crime reports?
A quick call to the sheriff's department revealed that someone in the neighborhood had reported a suspicious light glowing constantly from an upstairs window toward the well-traveled street. The department's sagacious drug agents surmised that such a light must be used for something illegal, such as growing marijuana.
Did the agents know that my father-in-law is 80 years old? Yes. Did they know that someone growing marijuana in his house would not be likely to advertise it through an uncovered window facing a street that is regularly patrolled by local police? Some people aren't too bright, they noted. Did they bother to check with Maple Heights police before conducting their raid? No.
Did the sheriff's department know that my father-in-law has lived in that house for over half a century, that he has meticulously nurtured flower and vegetable gardens in his back yard for most of that time and that he has cultured miniature fruit trees and seedlings with the help of a grow light in his upstairs front room for at least a decade? Not likely.
Never mind, my wife was told. All of this silliness could easily go away if my father-in-law would just give them permission to search his home and voluntarily give up his constitutional protection against such invasions without obtaining a search warrant based on probable cause.
Why not, some people say, if he has nothing to hide.
My father-in-law is not growing marijuana. But he does drink a black Russian now and then, and he knows all about the moral supremacists who had police busting into people's homes in search of alcohol during Prohibition.
You never know when liberal do-gooders might decide that parents possessing tobacco in their own homes constitutes child abuse. Right-wing book burners are still looking for John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." The Douay-Rheims version of the Bible is heresy to certain religious fanatics who want to control our government. Given the chance, anti-gun nuts would be knocking down doors too.
Yes, there are people in this country who would give up the rights that the founding fathers fought and died for. And yes, there are government agents who encourage ax-grinding neighbors to squeal on one another.
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