ALAMY
NAMELESS
AND SHAMELESS
send different officers in to conduct the raid. If this is really what
happened, there’s no excuse for it.”
According to press accounts,
Operation Eight Mile was coordinated by the Wayne County
Sheriff’s Office, but in response
to the Burleys’ initial requests
for information, Wayne County
claimed to have no record of the
raid. Instead, the county directed
the women to the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration.
That, too, proved fruitless. The
DEA told the Burleys that the agency was “experiencing a transition,”
and promised to provide information on the raid at a later date. That
never happened. It wasn’t until the
Burleys filed a lawsuit in state court
that Wayne County finally released
documents related to the raid,
which included a DEA report with
the names of the agents.
Neither the Wayne County
Sheriff’s Office, nor the DEA,
would comment for this article.
According to the report, the
agents who conducted the raid
at the Burleys belonged to a DEA
team called Group 6. For Operation Eight Mile, members of
Group 6 were paired with officers
from state and local agencies, and
renamed Team 11, the name the
HUFFINGTON
10.06.13
officers gave the Burleys.
In response to questionnaires
from the Burleys’ attorneys, the
officers involved in the raid denied violating the Burleys’ civil
rights. But none of them at the
time denied being on the team
that raided the house.
During depositions of the defendants, however, attorneys for
the Burleys were in for a surprise.
The DEA agents denied they were
ever in the Burley home. They
claimed that Group 6 had been
split in two, with half the agents
raiding the Burleys’ house, and
the other half raiding a nearby
house at the same time.
Each of the agents named in the
DEA report claimed that they were
in the other home, not the Burleys’.
Each told a story about one officer’s erroneous deployment of an
explosive distraction device during that raid. The vivid memory,
Six years
later, the
courts have
still not
required the
identification
of the
masked,
unnamed
agents
involved in
“Operation
Eight Mile.”