If your doors were kicked in and SWAT officers merrily planted their boots on your face, you would think that something quite horrendous had transpired – like a serious law had been broken, or perhaps someone was even physically harmed. But recently, members of a Wichita, Kansas SWAT team stormed the residence of two young adults who were law-abiding citizens, living in a nice home.
22-year-old Taylor Tymony and 21-year-old Michael Kostelecky lived in a nice home which investigators could not fathom how they could afford. This led them to believe that Tymony and Kostelecky were trafficking illegal drugs – with no other probable cause.
The door to their ‘nice’ home was also unlocked – but no matter, the SWAT team arrived around 10 in the morning, threatened the men inside with loaded guns, and forced their way in with a battering ram. The police used their shoes to smash the suspects’ faces to the floor. An officer also stomped on one of the men’s necks.
They then proceeded to ‘question’ their suspects by grilling them about what line of work they were in, and how they could afford an expensive home. They ripped the house to pieces looking for illegal contraband, but all they could find was an old, broken marijuana pipe that hadn’t been used in years.
The police had been observing the house from a few doors down because a third roommate had a prior drug arrest. They also reported “a high level of traffic coming to and going from the home.”
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Investigators failed to learn that Kostlecky’s parents actually owned the home, and were renting it to the two young adults while they were in Costa Rica. Tymony worked at a local BBQ joint and Kostlecky worked with local musicians as a producer – thus explaining the high traffic at the house.
Though no drugs or contraband was found, Tymony and Kostelecky were taken to a local precinct for further questioning. No search warrant was presented at the raid, but when the two men returned home form questioning, they found one sitting on the kitchen counter amidst the shambles of their house. The police had also been careless enough to leave a scarf on a radiator that was starting to burn by the time they arrived home.
“If they would have been home twenty minutes later, the house would have been engulfed in flames,” Torrie Porter, the mother of Taylor Tymony, said in a YouTube video about the incident.
Sadly, these type of SWAT raids in the name of a ‘drug war’ are happening more frequently, and they need to end.
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