A PowerPoint presentation is typically put together (and) a briefing of everybody sitting around the round table in our office ... and all the details are laid out as far as the suspect, the location, the route in, the ... evacuation points and ... where the closest medical [facility] is,” officer Brandon Beck said in a transcribed interview with county investigators.
To do a dynamic entry without the in-office briefing is “absolutely not our standard,” said Burnett, the officer who shot Blair, during an interview with investigators.
On the video, minutes before the raid begins, an officer can be heard asking the group, “Did somebody grab a copy of the warrant off my desk?”
“Oh, don’t tell me that,” Burnett replies. He then tells the other officers, “He doesn’t have a copy of the warrant.”
On Sept. 16, the day of Blair’s death, Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force investigator Shane Keyes received word that Blair had 2 ounces of heroin and would be getting more that night. Keyes asked 2nd District Judge Scott M. Hadley for a no-knock, nighttime search warrant because house “lookouts” were known to give warning when police were nearby. Meth dissolves quickly, Keyes added, and “if given the opportunity, Chournos will destroy the evidence.”
However, the warrant doesn’t mention that Chournos had already moved out of Blair’s home — a development officers noted in interviews after his death.
