Trial Monday for 12 Elian Bystander Claims

[rainbow4321]

http://www.baytownsun.com/wire.lasso?report=/dynamic/stories/B/BRF_CUBAN_BOY_LAWSUITS?SITE=TXBAY&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT


MIAMI (AP) -- A federal judge has set a Monday trial for the claims of a dozen people who said they were wrongly assaulted by federal officers during the raid that removed Elian Gonzalez from his family's home.

The plaintiffs say they were innocent bystanders who were gassed and beaten outside the home during the early morning raid on April 22, 2000.

"I think the public's going to be surprised that elderly people were gassed while praying the rosary," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which represents 11 of the plaintiffs.

[hector459]

1. Sorta like those protesters kneeling down and being sprayed by security

at the inauguration yesterday?

[Mika]

2. Not at all

They were blocking the AG ordered Border Patrol rescue of the boy being held by his kidnappers.

[sandnsea]

4. Two wrongs make a right?

I supported Elian going home, 100%.

But I did not remotely support the methods used to get him there. You can't pick and choose on civil rights. Either everybody has the right to peacefully protest government decisions, or nobody does. There was no call to send in those jackboots the way they did. If you don't want it done against war protestors, seems to me you shouldn't support it being done to these folks either.

[Mika]

5. No such thing

The family & the CANF lawyers representing them refused to return the boy to the INS - many times. It was the family and the CANF lawyers who forced the issue to the level requiring forced removal. Ms Reno gave them many chances, but the family/CANF lawyers were intransigent. Peacefull? Ha! There were armed thugs providing "security" at the house who were using the next door neighbor's house as a security encampment. There was a little reported raid on that house just seconds before they hit Lazaro's house that yielded many high power weapons and persons illegally in possesion of them (felons) acting as "security". MSM never covered that aspect of the story, but it was reported in Miami local press. The border patrol were using the Powel doctrine.. use overwhelming numbers of agents to ensure the safety of rescuee as well as the agents who were just following their orders. Thankfully, no one was shot or injured.



BTW, Mel Martinez campaigned in Miami by calling Border patrol agents who were just doing their jobs "jackboots" & "thugs" also, bringing condemnation by many law enforcement officials.

[sffreeways]

3. They were

trying to interfere with the boy being reunited with his father as he should have been.

This isn't going anywhere. They don't like it when they get a taste of their own medicine.

[radwriter0555]

6. Bogus. No one was gassed. No one was hurt. This is just that nutty

family trying to get one more dime and one more iota of attention.

The jury is going to laugh them out of the court room.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Yep, it took all this time to find a story, then a lawyer who'd sell it.

There were cameras going on outside the house and inside. Where are those photos of the truculent mob getting pounded? The officers knew the whole country was on them, and they had to pull it off safely in order to prevent an even more preposterous situation by some delusional people.

Our government's agents really work fast, considering they were in and out of the house with Elián and driving away in around 5 minutes. How DID they find the time to brutalize all these Cuban-Americans, as well as trash the Gonzalez house, while shouting off filthy words and threats at Marisleysis (so she claimed, and why would you doubt her) and tearing off the door to the bedroom and throwing it on the floor?



This image shows one of them sporting a sign calling Clinton a "murderer." Now where did that come from?


Poor, poor things.

Here's the L.A. Times story. You can see they didn't attach much significance to the bogus claims:

January 22, 2005
IN BRIEF / FLORIDA
Trial Date Set for Suit on Elian Gonzalez Raid


U.S. District Judge Michael K. Moore set a Monday trial date to hear claims of a dozen people who said they were wrongly assaulted by federal officers during the raid that removed Elian Gonzalez from his family's home.

The plaintiffs say they were innocent bystanders who were gassed and beaten outside the home during the raid on April 22, 2000.

Gonzalez was one of three survivors of a shipwreck that killed his mother and others fleeing Cuba.

He was returned to his father in Cuba.
(snip/...)http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-briefs22.6jan22,1,2296277.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I don't know ANYONE personally stupid enough to have put any stock in what these people were pushing.

Why have they only decided to get the ball rolling on their claims of brutality for something which happened back on April 22, 2000?

Swear words. Disgust.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Civil trial begins for 13 bystanders injured in Elian raid

From the Miami Herald, on the first
Posted on Mon, Jan. 24, 2005

Civil trial begins for 13 bystanders injured in Elian raid
Associated Press


MIAMI - A woman who lived near Elian Gonzalez's Miami family testified Monday that she clutched her chest and thought she was dying when a federal agent doused her with tear gas during the armed raid to reunite the boy with his Cuban father.

Maria Riera was the opening witness in the civil trial of 13 people seeking up to $250,000 in damages on claims that federal agents used unnecessary excessive force during the April 2000 raid, leaving them injured and emotionally distraught.

"I was stopped by a gentleman on my left approaching me with a shotgun," said Riera, who lived across the street from the home where the boy had lived since shortly after he was rescued from the water off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving Day 1999.
She said a black-garbed agent wearing a mask ordered her to "stand back" or he would shoot, adding a word of profanity. She said she complied, but a second agent approached with a gas gun as she stood in her driveway and left her in a gray cloud of tear gas.
(snip)

Plaintiffs include Riera and her ex-husband Eduardo Rodriguez, a watchmaker who blames eye dryness and recent cataract surgery on the gas.
(snip)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/10721657.htm
(Free registration is required)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They should NOT be confused with people who have actually been injured during legal protest demonstrations, this one in Oakland. Wooden bullets.


ETC.

The Cuban-"exile" extremists surrounding Lázaro Gonzalez house to prevent the U.S. Government's retrieval of Elián were attempting to block U.S. agents from carrying out a court order to pick him up. The uncle had been given every chance in the world, and was refusing publically to comply.

I'd like to see what would happen to an average citizen publically thumbing his nose at a federal court order.

[AngryAmish]

9. I always thought Marisleysis was hot

And kinda crazy.

[jasop]

10. The government was wrong and so are alot of you guys

The boy should not have been returned to a father who was so horrible that the mother risked her life and her childs life to reach safety.

http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y00/apr00/21e20.htm

[NewYorkerfromMass]

11. But the horrible mother exposed the boy to that risk

and in the end he had to watch her die... so who's more horrible?

[Judi Lynn]

12. She was not living with the father. She lived with a criminal.

Anyone who has taken the time to read about this already knows:

Any pursuit of truth in this story begins with this seminal question: Why did Elizabet Broton Gonzalez take her child on such a potentially dangerous trip? Your response determines how you will view all developments that followed. Either his mother was courageously helping her son escape tyranny -- or she was taking completely irresponsible risks with his life.

Crucial to finding an answer is knowing more about a Cuban man named Lazaro Munero. He was Elizabet's boyfriend -- not Elian's "stepfather," as he is identified by groups that want to keep the boy in the U.S. (MSNBC also mistakenly uses this ID).

Most of the available information on Munero comes from two sources only: a feature in the April 23 issue of NY Times Sunday Magazine, and an 11,000 word report in Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba's Communist Party. While the Cuban newspaper might be expected to stink of bias, the Times story also is suspect; much is made of the great-uncle's resistance to Castro in the 1960s, but no mention at all is made of their more recent legal woes, as described in the section below. But about Munero, both sources agree: He was a hustler with a reputation for brawling and violence.

Nicknamed "El Loco" apparently for his volatile temper, Elizabet met him at a nightclub four months after her breakup with Elian's father. Munero was 22, six years younger than her. A high school dropout, his work history included stints as an unlicensed taxi driver, a waiter, and sometimes selling beer and pop to tourists on the beach. He had already spent over a year in prison for robbing a tourist, and maybe additional time for chopping off someone's finger. "He was tough, maybe hardheaded (and) a hustler," one of his uncles told Miami New Times. "He was troubled."

Within two months of their meeting, he was living with Elisabet and Elian. Friends and relatives were concerned; he had a child that was still an infant. The girlfriend and mother of that child later described him as a "domineering and violent" drunk to Granma -- although the NY Times says that she described him in "softer, more complex terms" than others. The Cuban paper also says that Elisabet was found with black eyes and a swollen wrist, which she supposedly blamed on a dog.
(snip/...)

http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0004a/elian.html

[Mika]

13. Then why didn't she apply for a legal US immigration visa?

She never even applied for one the over 20,000 legal visas the US offers to Cubans every year, nor did she apply for her child.

She had Elian for weekend visits only as part of their joint custody agreement because her residence was too small. Elian lived with his father, who had a 3 bedroom house and walked him to his school every weekday. Every single person in their neighborhood interviewed by the US prosecution and defense lawyers said that the couple and family had a loving relationship, including the extended families of both parents and Elian's step mom.


Instead of using one of the legal methods to get to the US, and against the will of the father, she decided on taking an illegal and dangerous trip. The trip was on a leaky and overloaded boat (her boyfriend was on a regular smuggling operation @ $5000 a head. No life vests (its not like they aren't available in Cuba). Set out to sea (and the Gulf Stream can get very rough very fast).

This clearly put the child’s life at extreme and unnecessary risk, and constitutes reckless child endangerment. This clearly violates the joint custody agreement according to she and her ex husband’s (Juan Miguel Gonzales) divorce.

Of course the jurisdiction for all of the child custody issues belonged in Cuba, the country of residence of the only parent and of the child.

The 11th Circuit Court of the US agreed.

[Jacobin]

14. I hope they each win 25 cents

So they can call someone who gives a rat's ass.