When US Marshals Attack

Mandeville, LA – The Police State, practically speaking, was alive and well in Sarasota FL a few nights ago. The fact that the US Marshals operate on the belief that citizens know who they are and what their supreme powers are is dubious at best. Those who thought the tyrannical maneuvers in Boston this April were nothing to fret about might rethink that. Note the wonderful language skills of Marshall Wiggins and his abiding respect for the privacy of Miss Goldsberry and her home.

From the Herald Tribune.

Goldsberry, 59, said she had looked up from the sink to see a man “wearing a hunting vest.”

He was aiming a gun at her face, with a red light pinpointing her.

“I screamed and screamed,” she said.

But she also scrambled across the floor to her bedroom and grabbed her gun, a five-shot .38-caliber revolver. Goldsberry has a concealed weapons permit and says the gun has made her feel safer living alone. But she felt anything but safe when she heard a man yelling to open the door.

He was claiming to be a police officer, but the man she had seen looked to her more like an armed thug. Her boyfriend, Dorris, was calmer, and yelled back that he wanted to see some ID.

But the man just demanded they open the door. The actual words, the couple say, were, “We’re the f—— police; open the f—— door.”

Dorris said he moved away from the door, afraid bullets were about to rip through.

Goldsberry was terrified but thinking it just might really be the police. Except, she says she wondered, would police talk that way? She had never been arrested or even come close. She couldn’t imagine why police would be there or want to come in. But even if they did, why would they act like that at her apartment? It didn’t seem right.

The writer for the Herald Tribune, Tom Lyons, phoned the Lawman in question and got his side of the story. His comments that “She can’t say she didn’t know” is not quite up to the standard of door kicking in, then again, after Watertown, MA, what IS the standard in our expanding police state? Here’s the Marshal’s take.

The officer’s story

Matt Wiggins was the man at the door.

He’s with the U.S. Marshal’s fugitive division.

I asked him what happened. He said they had a tip that a child-rape suspect was at the complex.

That suspect, Kyle Riley, was arrested several hours later in another part of Sarasota.

The tip was never about Goldsberry’s apartment, specifically, Wiggins acknowledged. It was about the complex.

But when the people in Goldsberry’s apartment didn’t open up, that told Wiggins he had probably found the right door. No one at other units had reacted that way, he said.

Maybe none of them had a gun pointed at them through the kitchen window, I suggested. But Wiggins didn’t think that was much excuse for the woman’s behavior. He said he acted with restraint and didn’t like having that gun aimed at him.

“I went above and beyond,” Wiggins said. “I have to go home at night.”

Goldsberry was at home, I said. She had a gun pointed at her, too, and she wasn’t wearing body armor and behind a shield. She had no reason to expect police or think police would ever aim into her kitchen and cuss at her through her door to get in. It seemed crazy. She was panicked.

“We were clearly the police,” Wiggins insisted. “She can’t say she didn’t know.”

She does say so, actually.

“I couldn’t see them. They had a big light in my eyes,” Goldsberry said the next day. And that man she saw aiming a gun through her window had nothing visible that said “cop,” in her mind.

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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