Bounkham “Baby Boo Boo” Phonesavanh took center stage on TV Thursday with hardly a telltale sign that he had his face and chest badly wounded by a Habersham County SWAT team.
But the photographs preceding the now 2-year-old boy on "The Doctors" show made his trauma clear. They showed a disfigured face and a gaping wound in his chest from a SWAT team's stun grenade. It had landed in his playpen where he was sleeping when a law officer tossed it during the botched raid at a Cornelia home last May.
The good news from the doctors —including plastic surgeon Andrew Ordon —on the show is Boo Boo likely did not suffer long-lasting brain damage from the trauma and that the repair work done on his face so far — the blast dislodged his nose and damaged his mouth — was well done.
The bad news for Habersham County, where a grand jury declined to indict any law officers despite calling their raid “sloppy” and failing to follow sound tactics — in October is it probably will face a civil lawsuit.
The show's cast expressed shock the county has refused to pay any of the medical bills for Boo Boo or his father, whose shoulder was severely damaged when lawmen threw him to the ground in the raid. The family says it gets regular calls from collectors for bills totaling more than $1 million.
The doctor who examined the father said the shoulder contained two significant injuries, including a torn rotator cuff, which made it hard to use the arm, limiting his ability to work. One reason the family appeared on the show, besides national exposure for its plight, was to get a second medical opinion and medical assistance, said its lawyer.
Mawuli Mel Davis, a Decatur lawyer representing the family, said the county was relying on a clause in the Georgia constitution that forbid the paying of a “gratuity.” The irony, Davis said, was that if Boo Boo and his father had actually been arrested, the county would be on the hook for the medical care.
To recap, Alecia and Bounkham Phonesavanh took their four children to live with relatives in Cornelia last spring after their house burned down in Wisconsin. On May 28, a SWAT team staged an early morning no-knock raid to serve a warrant for a relative who the sworn warrant contended lived in the house and was armed and dangerous.
The raid produced no arrest — the relative, an alleged drug dealer, was not there — no drugs, no weapons and no drug-suspected cash. The alleged dealer, Wanis Thonetheva, was later arrested without incident during the day.
Habersham County sheriff deputies contend did not know there were children in the home despite the family living there for about two months. The shows’s cast appeared skeptical of the claim that the since-disbanded Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team had been watching the house before the raid because it is hard to hide four children and a minivan with car seats.
And Ben Tisa, a former head of the FBI SWAT team, said that the stun grenade should have been rolled into the room by a law officer who knew where it was going, which would have only resulted in scary bang rather life-altering injuries.
He said any investigation should be looking at the training for the deputies on the team.
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