From The Daily Mail:

A U.S. Marine who was killed when he was gunned down in his home near Tucson, Arizona, never fired on the SWAT team that stormed his house firing 70 times in a hail of bullets, a report has revealed.

The man accused of initiating the drug buy that led to the 2010 death of a Chandler, Ariz., police officer made a plea bargain with federal prosecutors four months earlier to avoid a long prison term, and worked as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at some time prior to the deal erupting in gunfire.

But Chandler police did not know John H. Webber had been working with federal officials when they ran a “reverse sting” targeting a quarter-million dollars that Webber and his cohorts agreed to pay for 500 pounds of marijuana supplied by undercover officers. Had the deal gone down as planned, the police would have kept the money under Arizona’s forfeiture law.

After the marijuana was delivered, one of the suspects opened fire with an AK-74 rifle, mortally wounding Detective Carlos Ledesma, according to police reports. Two other undercover detectives were shot, and two suspects were killed during the shootout on West Maldonado Drive in south Phoenix, about 16 miles from the Chandler border.

Maricopa County prosecutors said in court motions related to the ongoing murder case that Webber had worked as an informant for the DEA. However, the agency had stopped using him by the time of the shootout, and he had no authority to initiate the drug deal that led to Ledesma’s death, prosecutors argue.

The Goldwater Institute detailed the events that led to the shooting, and the extensive use of reverse stings by Chandler police, in a report published in March. The agency raised about $3.2 million through forfeitures in the year prior to Ledesma’s death, more than $2.7 million of that from reverse stings, according to city and court records.

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Police in Chandler, Ariz., have used money seized in drug stings to buy a new vehicle for the agency’s SWAT team, new guns for its officers, surveillance equipment, even a dog for its canine unit.

They use it to pay confidential informants, who work in the drug underworld putting together new drug deals that will lead to more cash being confiscated and converted to the exclusive use of the agency. In an 18-month period, one confidential informant was paid $248,598, according to city records. Another received $193,568 and a third $81,575 during that same time frame.

Forfeited money is kept in separate accounts under the exclusive control of department administrators. By law it must be used to supplement the agency’s regular budget, not to replace funds budgeted for normal operations.

In the last five years, Chandler police have raised more than $6.8 million through forfeitures. About $3.2 million of that came in the year leading up to the fatal shooting of an undercover narcotics officer engaged in a “reverse sting,” a lucrative but risky operation in which police pose as drug sellers rather than buyers. Chandler police staged 20 reverse stings in those 12 months, all but four of them far outside the city’s boundaries, according to court records.

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The SWAT Team was called in today at the Quincy Tea Party Rally. Obama was speaking at the convention center this afternoon.
Unreal.

They didn’t want any violence from these threatening protesters.

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