In June 2010, Las Vegas police conducted a no-knock raid on Trevon Cole’s apartment, where he lived with his nine-months-pregnant fiancée. Cole, who occasionally sold small amounts of marijuana, rushed to the bathroom to flush a bag down the toilet. An officer followed and shot him in the head, killing him. Cole was unarmed. The officer claimed Cole made a “furtive” movement, but others present, including Cole’s fiancée, never heard any warning.

Cole had no prior criminal record, but police secured the warrant by falsely linking him to a different Trevon Cole with a criminal history in Texas. Despite the clear misidentification and Cole’s lack of threat, a coroner’s inquest cleared the officer, who had previously shot two other men, killing one. This episode of Collateral Damage, hosted by Radley Balko, examines how the courts have failed to protect the Fourth Amendment in drug cases, featuring interviews with constitutional law scholars, Cole’s fiancée, and the daughter she was carrying during the raid, now a teenager.

Transcript

Radley Balko: At the time Trevon Cole was shot and killed by a Las Vegas police officer, he and his fiancée Sequoia Pearce were sketching out plans for a life together. The couple was engaged, and she was 40 weeks pregnant with their first child.

Sequoia Pearce: We were high school sweethearts. I was 40 weeks pregnant, so my due date was any day.

Radley Balko: They had moved to Vegas from Los Angeles so Pearce could be closer to her mother. With a baby on the way, it seemed important to be close to family.

Sequoia Pearce: He was a family man. Like, he loved his mother. He was the person who got me more family-oriented — that’s what moved us to Vegas.

Radley Balko: Cole was 21 years old and worked at a “True Religion” clothing store. Pearce was just 20.

Sequoia Pearce: Trevon was just full of life. Like, he was full of life. Everyone knew him. He was very popular.

Radley Balko: On the night of June 11, 2010, Cole and Pearce were watching TV in their home. At around 9 p.m., their peaceful evening was abruptly interrupted.

Sequoia Pearce: We were hanging out, watching TV, laying in bed. We heard like an aggressive knock on the door. And then we heard like glass shatter. So we kind of like, felt like someone was coming in on us, and we didn’t know like if we were being robbed.

Radley Balko: The couple jumped from the bed. Cole soon realized that the men breaking into their home were the police.

Sequoia Pearce: He was like, “Babe, where, where’s my weed?” And I was like, “I don’t know.”

Radley Balko: Cole had a bag of marijuana, about 7 grams’ worth — a typical amount for personal use. At the time, in 2010, cannabis was legal in Nevada for medicinal purposes but not for recreational use. Cole wanted to get rid of his pot before the cops could find it.

Sequoia Pearce: I ran into the closet, and then he ran into the restroom.

Radley Balko: As the raid team battered down the door and made their way through the house, Cole knelt down by the toilet and tried to flush the marijuana.

Sequoia Pearce: So I was in the furthest room of the apartment. So the first officers had their guns drawn and told me to get out the closet. And then as I got out of the closet, I stepped into our bedroom. The way, the facing of where I was in the bedroom, I can see inside the restroom. So when the officer kicked the door open and said “Freeze” and when Trevon raised his hands, it was just — the guys just shot him, and then the whole house just went silent.

Radley Balko: Las Vegas Metro Police Officer Bryan Yant had shot Trevon Cole in the face. The bullet pierced Cole’s cheek before burrowing into his neck. He died at the scene.

Sequoia Pearce: After they kicked the door in and shot Trevon, they dragged me out of the house. I had on shorts and a tank top. And initially, I was sitting in front of the apartment, and one of the officers just kept staring at me. I’ll never forget this guy’s face.

Radley Balko: Pearce was shocked, angry, and confused.

Sequoia Pearce: He’s like, “I believe they did say there’s someone in the house deceased.” I’m like, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” I was like, “No, it’s not.”

At some point, I figured something went wrong. And then from there, I don’t know if mentally I kind of shut out because I literally — I can say, like, when my mom came to get me from the scene, I really kind of wasn’t really aware of what just had happened before my eyes.

Radley Balko: Pearce had just watched the father of her soon-to-be born daughter, shot to death, right in front of her, while he knelt beside a toilet. She didn’t understand. Why had the police raided their home? Why didn’t they knock and let someone answer the door? Why had they opened fire so quickly?

Reporter: It wasn’t long after the shooting at this apartment complex that the family of the victim started having questions.

Sequoia Pearce [in news spot]: There was no weapons, no, like, Level 4 drugs. The only thing in there was marijuana because I knew he smoked.

Radley Balko: It would be bad enough if this had been your typical, hyped-up, no-knock raid by overly gung ho cops relying on sketchy information. Or another example of cops misconstruing an innocent gesture for a “furtive” one, then shooting an unarmed man, as Yant claimed. That was common enough at the time, particularly in Las Vegas.

But in this case, Yant had also misled a judge to get permission for their violent raid by pointing to the criminal history of an entirely different Trevon Cole.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage.

I’m Radley Balko. I’m an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal. When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric, and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country had dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is Episode 5, “What Fourth Amendment? How the Killing of Trevon Cole Almost Made Prime-Time TV.”

Andre Lagomarsino: I remember first hearing about this incident because I was watching the NBA finals at the time, and a newsflash came over television about the shooting that involved Trevon Cole.

Newscaster: Tonight, Action News is learning new details in the Metro shooting death of a suspected drug dealer last week.

Andre Lagomarsino: Trevon Cole’s family was driving in from California. They were Googling attorneys, and somehow they came across this article where my name was in, and they reached out to us to represent them.

Radley Balko: Las Vegas area attorney Andre Lagomarsino.

Andre Lagomarsino: And as soon as they got into town, they just came to my office, and that’s where we first met. So we not only became involved in the case and the investigation but trying to figure out, how do we deal with funeral arrangements, and how do we help the family get counseling, and how do we comfort them?

Radley Balko: Pearce spoke briefly to the press after Cole’s death. But with her baby arriving the following week, Lagomarsino stepped in as the family’s spokesperson.

News reporter: The family’s attorney tells me Trevon Cole had his hands in the air following officers instructions for several seconds before he was shot. But sources close to the investigation say that while they respect the family’s mourning, they stand by their case.

Andre Lagomarsino: It was my second case involving the police department. I had been practicing law for about 12 years. And I thought we would get a lot of blowback for representing somebody against the police department. I quickly learned the opposite.

Radley Balko: There’s a familiar debate that unfolds after police kill an unarmed person — about whether these sorts of cases are systemic problems, or merely the fault of a few “bad apples.” That can serve as a way for police to minimize abuse and misconduct. But there are a couple important points that get lost in the discourse: First, the aphorism is “A few bad apples spoil the bunch.” The point being, when you fail to remove the rotting apples, the rot eventually takes over the entire barrel.

This brings us to the second point: Any system that lets the “bad apples” continue working — or that even rewards or promotes them — is a fundamentally broken system. And in this case, the Las Vegas police department continued to coddle an incredibly rotten apple.

Andre Lagomarsino: We got a lot of anonymous calls, actually, from people within the department sharing information. They wouldn’t reveal their names, but they would provide information to us about Mr. Yant.

Radley Balko: Bryan Yant, the officer who shot and killed Trevon Cole.

Andre Lagomarsino: Detective Yant had a prior history of including false information and documentation that he would submit to the police department. The way we found out about that in this case was other lawyers had contacted me about information that they had discovered in their cases, which involved criminal investigations conducted by Detective Yant, where he would make statements and affidavits that weren’t true. For example, in one case, he made an allegation that somebody was verified to be in Las Vegas at the time a particular incident occurred, and travel records proved that that person was out of the country at the time.

Radley Balko: Detective Yant has denied these allegations. We reached out to him for comment, and he didn’t reply.

Yant had previously shot three other people — two of them fatally.

So in the months after Cole was killed, Lagomarsino had two lines of investigation to pursue: the policies and practices of the Las Vegas police department, and the history of Detective Yant himself.

There was one other variable in the raid that took Cole’s life.

The week police raided his home, they were being filmed by a crew from the long-running reality TV show “Cops.”

[“Cops” theme song “Bad Boys”]

Radley Balko: “Cops” first aired in 1989; it features high-drama footage of police making arrests, chasing suspects, negotiating domestic disputes, and so on. It’s one of the longest running TV shows ever. And it has always been controversial for its unrealistic portrayals of policing and for perpetuating racial stereotypes.

The show has also been criticized for the effect it can have on the agencies that agree to be filmed — that the prospect of making the final cut can prompt officers and deputies to be more confrontational and aggressive.

[“Cops” theme song continues]

Narrator: “Cops” is filmed on location as it happens. All suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty, in a court of law.

Radley Balko: As it turned out, the “Cops” crew was on another police bust the night Cole was killed, so the actual raid on his home wasn’t filmed. But the week prior, they did record an undercover drug buy from Cole. So there was an incentive for the officers investigating Cole to follow up — and to create the sort of drama that makes for good TV.

Andre Lagomarsino: In many cases, police officers love to kick down doors with AR-15s and big guns. They don’t need the show “Cops” to be able to do that, but in this case, we believe there was extra motivation that “Cops” had originally planned to videotape this raid. So they wanted to make it as glamorous and as........

© The Intercept