Police Drug Raid Puts Toddler In a Coma

They chucked a flash bang grenade into his playpen
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted May 30, 2014 12:18 PM CDT
Police Drug Raid Puts Toddler In a Coma
   (Shutterstock)

A Georgia toddler is in a medically induced coma with only a 50/50 shot at survival after police threw a "flash bang" grenade into his playpen during a drug raid. Police had a no-knock warrant for the Atlanta home, after a confidential informant said he'd bought methamphetamine there. Before going in early Wednesday, they threw the flash bang to distract anyone inside. The device landed directly next to 19-month-old Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, the boy's mother, Alecia Phonesavanh tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It blew open his face and his chest."

Phonesavanh says she was visiting her sister-in-law, who lives at the house, and that "everybody was asleep. It's not like anyone was trying to fight." The suspect police were hunting, Wanis Thometheva, was not in the house; he was arrested elsewhere later. "There was no clothes, no toys, nothing to indicate that there was children present in the home," a police chief tells WSB-TV. "If there had been then we'd have done something different." (More toddler stories.)

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