Busted doors, broken trust: When cops hunt a killer in wrong place

IT WAS JUST before dawn Aug. 22. Kasie Jones-Walker knelt in the darkness, her 1-year-old daughter at her ankles, as she invoked the Muslim morning prayer in an upstairs bedroom of their Kingsessing rowhouse.

Suddenly, the quiet ruptured. The front of the house rattled like a freight train. Jones-Walker, 33, a state employee and the daughter of City Councilman Curtis Jones Jr., heard a loud boom. Her husband, Anthony Walker, bolted downstairs as two of their three children started to cry hysterically at the top of the steep, narrow wooden staircase.

"I was scared to death," recalled Walker, 34, a barber. "I didn't know what was going on. I thought someone was breaking into my house. I live in a neighborhood where two doors over that way is crackheads and then two doors over that way is squatters."

Police officers, maybe eight of them, tore through the house. The lock on the red aluminum front door was busted. The door hung open, unhinged, pocked with dents. Lights, mounted atop police guns, zigzagged through the predawn darkness.

The detectives said they were looking for a murder suspect. They kept showing the couple a picture of a man whom neither of them recognized.

Relatives of the suspect had once owned the house on Greenway Avenue near 53rd Street, but it had been boarded and vacant for years when Jones-Walker and her husband bought it at a sheriff's sale in 2013.

Hunting down criminals is not easy: Most wanted felons don't want to be found, and they're often intentionally transient, moving from house to house. They provide courts, police and other city or state agencies with fake or outdated addresses.

As a result, cops armed with bad information - and battering rams - can leave behind busted doors and broken trust in crime-ridden neighborhoods where the relationship between residents and cops may already be strained.

Generally, the city only reimburses homeowners for property damage if police officers and city lawyers conclude that cops got the wrong house, said Mark McDonald, Mayor Nutter's press secretary.

But that has happened more than you might think. In the past four fiscal years, the city paid 31 claims at an average cost of $1,100 per door or door frame, amounting to more than $34,000. In 2012, the year in which the most money was spent, the city paid out 10 claims, for a total $9,670 or an average of $967 per door.

"They knew this wasn't the right house," Walker said. "So once they realized that, I just immediately got angry and I was like, 'Get out of my house.' "

Sometimes the cops make a mistake. But more frequently, the last known address connected to the suspect belongs to a mother, sister, aunt or uncle who says the relative hasn't lived there in years.

Kelvyn Anderson, executive director of the Police Advisory Commission, a city-funded watchdog agency, said he receives a lot of calls from residents complaining that cops broke doors and damaged property when the suspects didn't live there.

"This is one of those situations where you end up alienating a large number of folks unnecessarily with the off chance that you might find the person there," Anderson said.

Experts acknowledge that the job of tracking suspects can be messy and imperfect.

"It's a conundrum," said Eugene O'Donnell, a former assistant district attorney and professor of law and police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Not only do suspects lie, but their relatives and friends can lie to protect and harbor them.

"People will look you in the eye and say, 'We don't know the guy,' " or say they haven't seen him, O'Donnell said. "I don't think there is an easy, noncomplex answer to how do you walk into a place where you're looking for someone who just killed someone. . . . I think a lot of times the police leave people feeling like they are criminals."

For the safety of everyone involved, police have a "tactical and moral obligation" to learn as much as possible about the house and the people inside before bursting through the door, O'Donnell said.

"You hope they don't go in there blindly, that they have some sense of who they'll encounter once they're inside," O'Donnell said.

"In protecting themselves, they can't be reckless. It's not Fallujah [in Iraq]. You can't raze the village in search of a person."

Kayzar Abdul-Khabir and his wife and two young sons weren't in their West Philly home when cops came looking for a drug suspect in August 2014.

The cops used a crowbar to pop the lock of their steel security door. Police returned two more times that night to look for the man, who hadn't lived there in two decades and had no connection to the Abdul-Khabir family.

After the Daily News detailed their plight in a front-page story last year, both Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey called them to apologize.

The Police Advisory Commission's Anderson said he would like time and resources to examine how investigators decide which houses to hit and how often they find the person after a judge issues a search warrant.

When cops do hit the right house, it can turn into a deadly gunbattle.

In the early morning of July 21, SWAT officers were looking for Devon Guishard, 27, wanted for the murder of Megan Doto, 25, a pregnant woman struck by a stray bullet while sitting outside a Frankford home. Her unborn baby died, too.

Cops were executing a search warrant on Riverside Drive in Northeast Philly. The SWAT team knocked, and called out: "Police!" No answer. As the officers entered a second-floor apartment, the suspect fired a gun at the cops, striking one in the abdomen, according to the search warrant and police. His bulletproof vest saved him.

The officers returned fire, striking Guishard several times. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Relatives told the Daily News that cops had gone to the family home in Frankford about seven times looking for Guishard.

Natasha Guishard, Devon's sister, said that relatives always let the cops inside and that they never damaged the door.

The Riverside Drive house where cops found Guishard is about 12 miles from the family home.

"I didn't know why he was up there or who he was with," Natasha Guishard said.

Investigators developed intelligence that led them to the Riverside Drive address.

"I woke up the next morning to see on the news that my brother had been shot and killed," Natasha Guishard said. "I have to live with that the rest of my life."

When Anthony Walker realized that his home's invaders were cops, he dropped to his stomach on the living-room floor.

He said he feared they'd mistake the cellphone in his hand for a weapon, so he tossed it away, making it skitter across the hardwood floor.

Jones-Walker stood halfway down the stairs, in her socks and prayer robe. An officer grabbed her arm and forced her down the steps and to the floor, she said.

She said she explained that she was 5 months pregnant and that it hurt to be flat on her stomach, arms and legs stretched out. She also worried about her children, ages 1, 2 and 6.

"I kept turning my head, trying to look up at the top of the steps," she said. "I was nervous about my 1-year-old. I kept saying: 'Can I get my daughter? Can I get my daughter?' "

The SWAT team searched the house, and homicide detectives determined that the murder suspect wasn't there. Walker and his wife got up off the floor and sat on the couch. The officers directed their 6-year-old daughter to carry their 1-year-old down the steps, Jones-Walker said.

"I was mortified," she said.

"They just left and I'm saying to myself, 'How did they come into my house, violate me and my family and just leave my door wide open like this for whoever to walk in here?' " Walker said. "They left my house unprotected. They didn't even leave a cop car to watch the door that couldn't even be locked. So that's why I'm upset. You're looking for people, but you are causing other people problems."

Walker and Jones-Walker said they've retained a lawyer and are contemplating a civil lawsuit against the Police Department. They said detectives did not show them a search warrant. Their 6-year-old daughter remains traumatized, too scared to sleep, they said.

Police were looking for the man responsible for a murder earlier that month.

About 7 p.m. Aug. 15, officers responded to a call of multiple shots fired on 53rd Street near Kingsessing Avenue, and found Thomas Holman, 26, shot in the head and chest.

Homicide detectives zeroed in on Tyree Peel, who has a long criminal record and is known to cops as a neighborhood menace.

The Walker house on Greenway Avenue had belonged to a relative of Peel's, and his grandmother had lived there years ago.

The day after police burst into the Walker home, cops arrested Peel not far from the crime scene and charged him with Holman's murder.

In an interview, Councilman Jones told the Daily News that he wondered whether his daughter's house would have been treated that way if she lived in a different neighborhood, and that police officers should "do some due diligence before kicking in someone's door."

"Maybe you sit out in front of the house, take a look at who comes in and out, go through the trash to see who is living there, research the property to find out if it changed hands and who is the owner of record," Jones said. "It begs the question: Is there a different standard in Chestnut Hill vs. Southwest Philly? . . . If that were the mayor's block, they would have checked, they would have done a little more homework."

Lt. John Stanford, a police spokesman, speaking generally, said homicide investigators "do a number of checks and various surveys and surveillance when looking for suspects wanted for murder."

Stanford said investigators do not rely on property records.

"In regards to property-record checks, most homicide suspects don't own any property, let alone the property that they are residing in when attempting to elude authorities," Stanford said. "Often there is some type of relationship between the 'homeowner' and the homicide suspect."

In the Walker incident, Stanford said, the Greenway Avenue address was "a last known residence for Mr. Peel, as well as the address he provided even after being taken into custody for the homicide."

The court-issued search warrant, added Stanford, required officers to knock before entering the Walker house.

"It's a good possibility [the Walkers] didn't hear the knock if they were sleeping prior to officers gaining entry," Stanford said.

Stanford said investigators later returned to the Walker house to apologize and told them whom to contact in city government to get the door repaired.

The Walkers said the apology seemed halfhearted, even accusatory. They said that upon leaving, the detective said, "Well if you see him [Peel] around, tell him to stop using your address."

The subtext, Jones-Walker said, was that the detective thought they were lying and really did know the suspect.

"I don't think [police] value the regular citizens, the ones who are getting up day to day and just trying to keep stability in a neighborhood," she said.

"I feel like they are kind of like, 'Oh, well, you're a casualty, basically a casualty of war.' That's the war out there," she said, gesturing toward the street beyond her home.

"And we sometimes are casualties."

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