HOME RAIDED ON WHIM OF A WHIFF

Cops Storm Residence After Wrongly Surmising Source Of Marijuana
Odour

Sometimes, the nose doesn't know. Police followed the odour of growing
marijuana to an Abbotsford home, then more than a dozen officers
raided it Sunday evening with guns drawn.

Oops.

Instead of a grow-op, they found a respectable couple, their daughter
and her fiance, who had been sitting upstairs together looking at the
couple's photos from a recent fishing vacation in the B.C. Interior.
Roadie, the 14-year-old arthritic dog, was lying in his customary
position at the top of the stairs.

It was around 7 p.m. when the family heard a terrific pounding on the
front door. Daughter Tracie Fast, a co-ordinator at a
helicopter-repair company, went to the window and saw police in the
yard. One shouted "open the door!" and she walked downstairs and did
so, stepping out onto the porch.

About a dozen officers were pointing handguns at her, and when she
turned her head, there was a cop with an assault rifle right next to
her, she said. The police said they had a warrant to search the house,
but they wouldn't tell her what for. There were more police behind
trees at the side of the house, and still more at the rear, said Fast,
37.

Fast complied with the request to call her family down, and she, her
father Ken, 63, mother Connie, 57, and fiance Scott Richardson, 36,
stood on the lawn, surrounded by police. A few minutes later, the cops
handcuffed them all, and put them into two squad cars.

"It was absolutely horrifying," Fast said. "None of us have any kind
of record or history with the police. My mother hasn't even had a
traffic violation. I certainly didn't like seeing my family hauled off
to different vehicles, and being handcuffed. It was
heartbreaking."

Neighbours driving by slowed down to rubberneck, she
said.

"This was the most embarrassing and humiliating thing that has ever
happened to any one of us," Fast said.

Her father's mother died Friday, so the incident came at a
particularly stressful time for the family, she said.

After the search, with a drug dog, turned up nothing, a sergeant
"red-faced" with contrition admitted police had erred, she said.

"He said, 'Yeah, we screwed up,'" Fast said. "I said, 'What would make
you come here? Did somebody report us, saying we had a growop?' He
said, 'We've been down in this neighbourhood and we noticed the smell
of marijuana growing. Every time we came to this corner it smelled
like it came from your house.'"

She asked the sergeant if the odour was enough for a warrant, and he
told her, "all he had to do was say he smelled marijuana growing" to
get a warrant, she said.

The officer told her police had run checks on the licence plates of
the family vehicles in front of the house, and he was given pause by
the fact that no one in the home had ever been in trouble with the
law, she said. But he went ahead with the raid any way.

Her mother, who was "beyond furious," made a verbal complaint at the
Abbotsford Police Department station Monday, her daughter said.

Abbotsford police spokesman Const. Ian MacDonald said the department
plans to apologize to the family of "upstanding citizens," and will
give them information on how to file a formal complaint.

"We are endeavouring to make things right with them," MacDonald
said.

Police conducted the raid with the precautions necessary for executing
a drug-related search warrant, MacDonald said. "Organized crime and
gangs are the people who are controlling drug distribution, drug
production and drug trafficking," MacDonald said. "We come across
people who are looking to protect their commodity. It's commonplace
for us to come across firearms."

To obtain the warrant, police cited "visual indicators" of marijuana
production in addition to smell, MacDonald said. He said he couldn't
say what those indicators were because he didn't have the warrant at
hand.