Whatever Happened To ...
... the mayor whose dogs were shot
by Kris Coronado Cheye Calvo is in a good mood. For one thing, his wife, Trinity Tomsic, has grown one of the best vegetable gardens the couple has ever had. “The peas were as high as corn,” he boasts. Such appreciation for the small
things in life shows how far Calvo, the 39-year-old mayor of Berwyn Heights, has come since July 29, 2008, when a SWAT team from the Prince George’s County Sheriff ’s Office charged into his home and uprooted his life. The family’s story was detailed in The Washington Post Magazine in 2009. Calvo was returning from an
evening walk with his black Labradors, Payton and Chase, when he picked up a large package addressed to his wife and brought it indoors. He says he figured Tomsic, now 35, had ordered gardening supplies. Calvo was upstairs when he heard the screams of his mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, now 53, who lived with them. The SWAT team had burst into the house and shot the two dogs to death. When Tomsic arrived home, her husband and mother were handcuffed, proclaiming their innocence.
for the original story, go to
washingtonpost.com/magazine.
The 32-pound box, filled with
marijuana, had been targeted during an investigation into drug smuggling. But after searching the home for hours, deputies turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. About a week later, Prince George’s Sheriff Michael Jackson and Police Chief Melvin C. High announced the arrests of a FedEx deliveryman and an accomplice. Law enforcement officials later acknowledged that Calvo, Tomsic and Porter were victims of a
from july to december 2009
105 // SWAT team deployments by Prince George’s County Police Department for nonviolent offenses
(Continued from Page 4)
felt like the last second, it turned aside, looked me in the eye and sidled by. The body just kept going past for, like, ever. And as I’m rotated, looking at it, I saw th at right behind me was another whale, a calf, that stayed behind; the mom was coming back to protect her. Now what’s the easiest thing to do if an insect is next to your precious calf? Just take it out. Fifteen-foot jaws and 9-inch teeth, you know. But it chose not to. It chose to take the gentler path.
And I kind of fell in love with sperm whales from that moment. When I think about why I do what
I do, about what inspires a person to want to see what’s down there a thousand meters deep, it is that same thing that inspired me when I was a kid snorkeling with my brother, each of us pushing a little harder to see around that next crevice, around that next rock — just the pure joy of discovery. And then to have the opportunity to go to the next step and to see what that
sperm whale is doing in its abyssal world, a mile deep into the ocean, when we couldn’t possibly be with it any other way than with the Crittercam [the underwater camera system we developed]. How can’t one be inspired by that? There’s something magical,
something spiritual, at least for me, about being this close to a 50-foot sperm whale that chooses to tolerate you being there. Why? Because of some sort of affinity with other living things.
august 15, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine 5
Top left: Cheye Calvo and wife Trinity Tomsic after the 2008 raid. Top right: Mementos of their dead dogs. Bottom: Tomsic and Calvo with their new dogs.
scheme in which criminals mailed drugs to unsuspecting recipients, then planned to intercept the packages. But officials defended the raid. “That for us was a trigger,” says
Calvo, who contacted state lawmakers and pushed for legislation that would subject SWAT teams to greater scrutiny by requiring them to submit detailed reports on their deployments every six months. Gov. Martin O’Malley signed the measure into law in May 2009. Calvo, Tomsic and Porter are suing
the Sheriff ’s Office and Prince George’s County Police Department, which participated in the raid, and the trial is scheduled to begin in February 2011. Porter moved into a Greenbelt
apartment in December 2008. In March 2009, Calvo and Tomsic brought home Xander, a male Lab, who joined Marshall, another male Lab, who became part of the family in August 2008. Calvo says he and his wife hope to adopt a child next year. “We just went hiking in Yellowstone,”
Calvo says. “We’re on this ridge and can see Old Faithful in the background. I’m thinking, ‘My goodness, life is wonderful.’ Feeling that way again took a while, but it’s so great.”
2008 PHOTOGRAPH BY MARVIN JOSEPH; DOG TAGS PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA DROBIS; 2010 PHOTOGRAPH BY KEITH EGLI
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