Episode Two: A Death in the Dark

In January 2008, Ryan Frederick, a 28-year-old who worked the night shift at a Coca-Cola plant in Chesapeake, Virginia, found himself at the center of a tragedy. Just days after his home had been burglarized, Frederick was jolted awake by the sound of his dogs barking and someone breaking through his front door. Grabbing his handgun, he cautiously approached the noise. A lower panel of the door had been shattered, and an arm was reaching through, fumbling for the handle. Frederick fired. The arm belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers, who died from the gunshot wound. Frederick was arrested and initially charged with capital murder, with prosecutors even considering the death penalty. This episode revisits the night that changed Frederick’s life forever and ended Shivers’s. We hear from Frederick himself as well as veteran narcotics officer Neill Franklin. Transcript Ryan Frederick: My name is Ryan Frederick. 45 years old now. Born and raised in an area of Chesapeake, Virginia, called South Norfolk. Grew up with a pretty simple normal childhood. Had a mom and dad, sister, grandma and grandpa close by. Kind of small town, blue collar. Really happy childhood. Radley Balko: At the age of 28, life was going pretty well for Ryan Frederick. Ryan Frederick: Everything was good. I was engaged to be married with a girl I had been with for about four or five years. I worked as a merchandiser for Coca-Cola. And that was a great job for me, because I was a morning guy. Typically would wake up around 3, get to the first store between 3:30 and 4:30 fill the shelves with the product, move on to the next store. Pretty easy job. Great benefits. It was a great job for someone in their young 20s, had potential future promotions throughout the whole company, could transfer anywhere in the country or world for that matter. You know, I could have worked there for another 20, 30 years. It would have been a job I would have probably retired from. Radley Balko: He had also taken up gardening.  Ryan Frederick: I had got some banana trees from my grandfather’s house when he had passed, and I cloned them and had them growing in buckets in the backyard. I had a big dream, but it probably was silly. I was going to clone Japanese maples and start a business selling trees. Radley Balko: And for a while, Frederick also grew cannabis. He was a shy guy who had lost his parents at an early age. So to relax, he smoked pot. And after discovering his green thumb, he thought it would be less risky to grow his pot himself. Ryan Frederick: Yeah, at the time, I did smoke marijuana and had, I don’t remember how many plants, just a few plants. Nothing major. I didn’t want to have to deal with going to find people to buy it. And I just figured it would have been easier just mind my own business, deal with my own stuff. Radley Balko: But over the course of just a few days, the drug war would come crashing down on him — and change at least two lives forever. Ryan Frederick: I didn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t digest that. I was like, “What?” He was like, “You just killed a police officer.” Radley Balko: From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage. I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.  The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeat drug addiction, but the “war” part quickly became all too literal. When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.  All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage. In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable. This is Episode 2, A Death in the Dark: The story of Ryan Frederick and Detective Jarrod Shivers. Ryan Frederick: It was either a Monday or Tuesday. I’d come home from work. I had a fenced-in yard, and my privacy fence had been bashed in. It didn’t look right. Someone had come in and done that. Radley Balko: It was January 2008. Ryan Frederick had just come home after working his shift at the Coca-Cola plant to discover that someone had broken into his home. Ryan Frederick: And then I went in my garage where I had those plants growing. There was all but like two of them stolen, door kicked in. Radley Balko: Those plants were marijuana — eight in total, according to Frederick.  At the time, it was still illegal to grow pot in Virginia for any reason. Possession of the drug was a misdemeanor, punishable by 30 days in jail and up to $500 for a first offense. So for obvious reasons, Frederick didn’t report the robbery. He told only his fiancée. Ryan Frederick: So the break-in happened, my fiancée comes home. She comes unglued, livid, like, “Get this crap out of here, I told you this should have never been in here,” blah blah blah. Radley Balko: Until then, Frederick says his fiancée had been more worried about the police than about thieves breaking in to steal the plants. But the burglary unnerved her. “It gives you a really, really, really, really uneasy feeling when you’ve seen your home broken into.” Ryan Frederick: So I gather everything up, except for a banana tree. Take it and dispose of it, get rid of it up the road. All right, I’m done. I’m on board with her. I’m like, if this is gonna be the result of it, I don’t need that. I would rather go pay for it if I’m gonna do it than chance somebody coming in here and, you know, frazzling her. It gives you a really, really, really, really uneasy feeling when you’ve seen your home broken into. Radley Balko: Three days later, on the night of January 17, another break-in. This time, Frederick was home when it happened. Ryan Frederick: It was a Thursday evening. I go lay down, probably around 7:45ish, 8 o’clock. Everything’s pretty typical day: Went to work, come home, grab the locks, fiancée said she was going to the game, I said I’d probably be in bed. So I went home, had dinner, went to sleep. And then, abruptly startled out of my sleep, I hear this big bang, crashing sound, and then I hear, like, wood breaking, like a tree, and I’m like, “What?” And then my dogs are just, like, barking out of control in a way that I’ve never heard them bark. So I’m already a little bit uneasy because we just had a break-in. So I’m like, “What the world is going on?” So I grab my gun and I started heading down the hallway.  Radley Balko: It was a few hours past dusk, so it was dark outside. Ryan Frederick: So I’m going down, and I’m hearing these dogs, and I’m walking around the corner down the hall, and as I pass the end of the hallway, I can see in the door — it’s a four-panel door, two long panels at the bottom and two smaller square ones up top — someone had busted one of the bottom panels out of the door. And all I could see was blue jeans and a black jacket.  Now, that person that was standing there, I could see he was reaching down, reaching up for the deadbolt. I could kinda see that there was one other person behind him. So I was like in total freak panic mode at that point. And I’m like, “Oh my god.”  So I’m thinking in my head, this guy that’s broke in my house a couple days ago, he left a couple things and maybe he didn’t get it all ’cause I’m coming home and ran in and scared him off. He’s back. And he’s got somebody with him.  So, as that hand was going for that deadbolt, I shot for his hand. His arm quickly came back out of that door.  Radley Balko: Frederick couldn’t find his cordless phone to call 911. But he suspected a neighbor must have witnessed the break-in and called the police.   Ryan Frederick: It felt like five minutes had passed, but I don’t know that it was. And I finally saw cop cars, and I was like, “Oh, thank God.” So I opened the door at that point, and I’m getting ready to come out, and there’s like what seemed like 50 cops with all their guns drawn on me. So I get down onto the ground, and he cuffs me. And he asked me, he said, “Do you know what you just did?” And I was like, “Not, not really. I don’t know what’s going on.” And he was like, “You just killed a police officer.”  Radley Balko: The arm he’d shot at belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers. Like the other cops, Shivers was dressed in dark clothing with police demarcations that weren’t visible to Frederick. He could only see a dimly-lit sleeve reaching through the door panel. He assumed he had just shot a burglar. Already in handcuffs, Frederick says the officers then took their anger out on him. Ryan Frederick: It was one elbow to the back of the head to the next elbow until I was just [dragged] two doors down. And they finally stopped and took me to a police car. Then I got in the back of the police car. And a gentleman was asking me questions, and telling me that I just killed a police officer and wanted me to tell him what happened. But a whirlwind of emotions had come through me, and I was very sick and started throwing up in the back of his cop car when he told me. ’Cause I’m like, “No, no, no, what? Like, I went from sleeping, and 15 minutes later, you’re telling me I killed a cop.” And I just, I, I don’t know how to register that. Radley Balko: Just a week earlier, Frederick was engaged, working a job he loved, and gardening in his spare time. In the span of just a few days, he’d been burglarized, then woke up a few nights later to find someone breaking into his home once again. Now he was sitting in the back of a police car, being interrogated about killing a cop. It was in this chaotic moment that it first hit him: The break-in and the raid on his home must have been connected. Ryan Frederick: He’s asking me these questions. And I’m trying to walk him through it. ’Cause I’m like, “Hold on dude. We gotta go back a couple days before I tell you this.” First of all, trying to tell him, “Listen, you’ve got to understand there was a break-in three days ago.” And he was like, “Listen, we already know about that break-in.”  And he asked me what was growing in the garage. And I said, “I got a banana tree.” And he said, “What’s in the garage? We know you got a lot of marijuana in the garage. Where is it?” And I’m like, “I don’t have any. I got a banana tree.” Radley Balko: It was a fleeting moment in the midst of a tense exchange. But for Frederick, it was revelatory. How could the police have known about the break-in? Ryan Frederick: Afterwards, when I replayed every single second of that night over and over and over and over again in my head, it occurred to me that he said he knew about the break-in, but I never reported it. And that was the beginning of starting to realize that this isn’t as honest as it always seems in the movies. Radley Balko: Frederick was taken to the Chesapeake jail. He would soon be charged with capital murder — the intentional killing of a police officer. Within days, a prosecutor announced that the state was considering seeking the death penalty. I first heard about Ryan Frederick shortly after the police raid on his home in 2008. I had been writing about aggressive drug raids for long enough that readers had started sending me stories about these incidents as they happened. This one seemed particularly bad. It was a marijuana raid, but the police had only found some young Japanese maple trees. In most cases, when a drug raid goes wrong, it’s the target of the raid who pays the price. But not always.  Detective Jarrod Shivers is one of dozens of law enforcement agents who have been killed while serving a search warrant for drugs. In most of the deaths, like Shivers’s, it could have been prevented with less aggressive tactics. But as with the other fatal raids before and after this one, instead of reckoning with the failed policies that culminated in Shivers’s death, Virginia police and prosecutors came after Ryan Frederick.  Ryan Frederick: I never would have known that it can be as dirty of a justice system as it is. That prosecutor is looking at it like a football game. He’s not looking at it like right and wrong. It’s a win or loss. And that’s what you are. You’re a winner or loss to the guy. Radley Balko: As weeks and months passed, it became increasingly clear that the state’s prosecution of Frederick was as much about a vindictive effort to distract from the mistakes of police officers — mistakes that cost them the life of one of their own — as it was about justice. “How many times do they do it and don’t get caught?” Ryan Frederick: I have a lot of animosity towards the police force and the prosecution for doing things so dirty and unethical, but doing it with such ease and so much comfortability of doing this, I wonder how long — How many times do they do it and don’t get caught? Radley Balko: Early on, police and prosecutors claimed that Frederick was a hardened, arrogant drug dealer — that he had boasted about killing Shivers and even mocked Shivers’s widow. But friends and neighbors Frederick described him to me as a slight, shy man — almost meek. He was small, 5-foot-7, and just 120 pounds. He was friendly and warm. His neighbors liked him. Frederick had no prior criminal record besides traffic violations, and there’s no evidence he ever sold marijuana. According to the state of Virginia, this modest guy — recently engaged and working a job he loved — chose to confront a heavily armed team of raiding cops with only a handgun. They claimed Frederick did this, even though there was nothing incriminating in his home. They claimed that he intentionally killed a police officer, and then boasted about it at the city jail. It just didn’t add up. Even early on, Frederick’s own story seemed far more plausible. That story was he had no idea that the men breaking into his home were police. The previous break-in only gave credence to his claim of self-defense. And the more we learned as Frederick’s trial unfolded, the more his story seemed like the accurate one. As he sat in his jail cell, Frederick tried to piece together how growing a few pot plants for his own use had led to the police taking a battering ram to his door. As far as he knew, only four other people had known about the plants: his best friend, his fiancée, his fiancée’s sister, and her boyfriend. Frederick concluded quickly that the boyfriend must have given him up. Instead of reckoning with the failed policies that culminated in Shivers’s death, Virginia police and prosecutors came after Ryan Frederick.  Ryan Frederick: So Steven Wright was the boyfriend of my fiancée’s sister, Stephanie’s boyfriend. And I hadn’t seen him in eight months or so. Apparently, he had gotten in some credit card fraud trouble and went to the police, and said, “Look, I know this guy. He’s got this big operation. It’s there right now. Let’s forget these credit card charges, and I’ll take you there.” Radley Balko: Steven Wright had turned him in to get out of his own legal trouble. He’d later say that the police implied he’d receive leniency for implicating Frederick. We reached out to Wright for comment but have not received a response as of this recording.  According to Frederick, Wright had asked to buy some marijuana from him. Frederick says he declined and told Wright he didn’t sell the drug. It was only for his own use. But in court, Wright claimed he had bought marijuana from Frederick 40 to 50 times. When he testified at Frederick’s trial, Wright had been in jail for months. Yet days after that testimony, he was released on bond. But that was only the beginning. As I continued to report on the case, I got a tip that there was another informant involved — a man named Renaldo Turnbull Jr. Turnbull told me that he had been working as a police informant for months, and that it was he and Wright who broke into Frederick’s home. He also confirmed that they had broken into the home for the specific purpose of retrieving the pot plants, so that the police would have probable cause to obtain a search warrant. Indeed, the search warrant application was based solely on information provided by an unnamed informant. It also said that the informant had been inside the apartment within 72 hours prior to the affidavit. But it wasn’t just this incident. Turnbull said he and Wright had broken into several more homes to obtain the evidence the police needed to get warrants against other people too. He said they’d break in, steal drugs, turn over some of the drugs to law enforcement, and keep some of them for themselves. That, of course, would break a number of laws.  Turnbull said police knew that they were keeping those drugs, and that both men were promised leniency on their own criminal charges in exchange for their cooperation. Chesapeake police denied Turnbull’s allegations and claimed he wasn’t even an informant for the Frederick case. At a pre-trial hearing, after vehemently denying it during an arraignment, prosecutors ended up conceding that a police informant was involved in the first break-in. But they claimed that they had no knowledge of it at the time, and didn’t learn until months later that their informants were breaking into homes to obtain evidence. But that isn’t what Turnbull told me. And at Frederick’s trial, his attorneys played a recording of Frederick’s conversation with a police officer shortly after the raid on his home.  When Frederick said his house had been burglarized, the officer responded, “We know that.” Later, the officer said again, “First off, we know your house had been broken into, OK?” Neill Franklin: It is not acceptable to have your informant either commit a crime, like breaking into someone’s home, to get evidence to bring to you, to use for you obtaining a search warrant. Radley Balko: That’s Neill Franklin. Neill Franklin: I’m a 34-year police veteran. So I spent 23 years with the Maryland State Police, and most of that time was either in narcotics investigation, criminal investigation, or training for the Maryland State Police.  Radley Balko: During his career, Franklin worked with nine different drug task forces in the mid-Atlantic area. Neill Franklin: So when it comes to using informants in drug cases, generally speaking, they’re unreliable. Radley Balko: Especially if they’re in legal trouble. And especially if they have a relationship with the target of the investigation. Neill Franklin: You want to stay away from an informant that might have personal interest in the case. And if that’s the case with Frederick and this informant, that’s a very, very poor decision on part of the investigators and the police officers who were managing this case. Radley Balko: Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. Because the identities of informants are typically kept secret — even from judges and defense attorneys — it’s all too easy for police to use informants in ways that skirt or violate laws. It’s a long-recurring theme in the war on drugs. So the way Frederick was targeted, as unethical as it sounds, it isn’t very unusual. Later, during his trial, Frederick says the police tried to sanitize the investigation. Ryan Frederick: Their story was, well, Steven Rene Wright, the informant, told us somebody broke in — but didn’t tell us it was him. And what do you do when the police are telling you a lie? And how much are you going to argue with the people that make the law? Radley Balko: But even setting aside how the warrant was obtained, there’s also the question of why police decided to serve it after dark, and with a violent, forced-entry raid. Ryan Frederick: I feel bad about what happened with that guy, but my actions were something that I stand on my sword with. If you come into my house in the middle of the night, I am not going to guarantee either one of us get out of there. Radley Balko: That’s one of the many problems with no-knock raids, Franklin says. Neill Franklin: This is what we use more than anything else, unfortunately, as you’ll see. It’s when we, the police, can serve a search warrant without knocking, without announcing ourselves. We can literally just breach your door, come in, and start searching, secure the premises, secure the people.  Radley Balko: I’ve been reporting on these raids for 20 years. It continues to baffle me why police use such violent, volatile tactics for such low-level offenses. The police obtained a no-knock warrant in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor. But there’s a long list of other, less well-known victims. People like David Hooks in East Dublin, Georgia; Eurie Stamps in Framingham, Massachusetts; Ismael Mena in Denver; and Jose Guerena in Tucson.  Neill Franklin: We’re tearing your door off the hinges. Many times we use things like flash-bang grenades. We’re armed to the teeth. We have semi-automatic rifles and pistols. We have all types of equipment with us, and they’re very violent, very loud. And we typically do these during hours of darkness. We really have to have good policy and protocol in place, number one, for using a no-knock raid because they are dangerous. And sometimes, unfortunately, they turn deadly. Radley Balko: Police have always had the power to break into a home without knocking in the case of an emergency — so when somebody’s life is in danger. But the use of a pre-planned no-knock raid as a tool of the drug war was first suggested during Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Congress eventually passed a bill authorizing these tactics for federal narcotics officers, but then repealed it a few years later after a series of botched raids terrorized innocent people and made national news. Yet the tactic reemerged and eventually spread around the country as the drug war escalated in the 1980s. Neill Franklin: Now, the thing with a no-knock warrant, it is the element of surprise. So why would you need the element of surprise? Number one, to ensure that the property that you’re seeking, that you’re trying to seize, is not destroyed or disposed of, or altered in any kind of way. So it has to be done quickly. The other thing is, if there’s evidence, if there’s the intelligence, the history of violence with the people who are inside — say, for instance, the resident or the building — then yes, again, you need the element of surprise.  Radley Balko: None of those conditions was present in Ryan Frederick’s case. Neill Franklin: In this particular case, Frederick’s case, if they’re looking for marijuana plants, number one, they’re not going to be easily destroyed. It’s just not going to happen. I don’t know a toilet large enough that you can flush ’em down. As far as I know, from what I’ve read about this case, there’s no evidence or intelligence regarding him using violence or possibly using violence. They should have served this warrant during the daytime. It’s safer for everyone. You’re giving the person time to come to the door peacefully. It’s in daylight. You’ll have a better search. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for. We have an individual here who was employed. He worked at a place where you had to go in at a certain time for your shift. We’re not talking about someone who doesn’t have a job. There’s routine here. It wouldn’t have taken much to establish where he worked, what time he had to be at work, what was his shift, when does he leave, when does he get home, who else is in the home. “It wouldn’t have taken much to establish where he worked, what time he had to be at work, what was his shift, when does he leave, when does he get home.” Radley Balko: These are simple details that a basic investigation should have discovered. And if the Chesapeake Police Department had done that legwork, they’d likely have discovered that Ryan Frederick was not a major drug dealer. They had no evidence that he had ever sold drugs to anyone. The police never attempted a “controlled buy” — that’s police jargon for a drug purchase done in coordination with law enforcement. And it’s pretty standard practice before busting a drug dealer. There were also no complaints from neighbors. Some even testified in Frederick’s defense at trial. And despite claiming to have surveilled Frederick, the officers testified that they never witnessed a drug sale. That isn’t uncommon either. There are just way too many incentives prodding police officers to take shortcuts in these cases.  If narcotics officers think there may be a large drug supply somewhere, they’ll want to get to it quickly, before it’s moved. Some serve more than 10 warrants per week. That previous year, Shivers’s unit had served at least 50. With that many cases, there often just isn’t enough time to conduct a thorough investigation. It’s just easier for police to default to using overwhelming force on every warrant. The results this time were predictably tragic. And Detective Shivers is far from the only member of law enforcement to suffer the consequences. Denver7: The news is tracking a developing story. A man is dead and an officer wounded after police bust into a home in Northglenn to make a drug raid. KAGS: As officers tried to enter the house, Magee picked up an AR-10 semi-automatic rifle from his bedroom and fired at officers, killing Deputy Adam Sowders. WBAL: Using a no-knock warrant, Baltimore County Police raided a house on Roberts Avenue. 36-year-old officer Jason Schneider was killed. Neill Franklin: So when someone comes breaking into their home, forcefully, in the middle of the night, waking them up — they’re not going to think that it is the police. They’re going to think that they’re getting robbed. They’re going to think that this is a home invasion by some criminal or criminal group. And they’re going to try to protect themselves, waking up out of a dead sleep, grabbing their firearm or knife or whatever it may be to confront the person coming into their home, who they believe is a criminal. That’s dangerous for them. It’s dangerous for the police. Ryan Frederick: I don’t blame them for shooting back. Radley Balko: Ryan Frederick says he was nearly killed that night, when one officer returned fire, though the police deny this. But that’s not what upsets him. Ryan Frederick: I don’t blame that officer. I blame his boss for putting him in that situation and for allowing that situation to occur. Neill Franklin: How many times did you have a violent person somewhere, barricaded somewhere, where you had to use a SWAT team? Probably zero in a month for a department like Chesapeake. Very, very seldom for many of these police departments out here that have SWAT teams. Radley Balko: After he retired, Neill Franklin spent 10 years as executive director of an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, as in drug prohibition. The group has since changed its name to Law Enforcement Action Partnership, still abbreviated LEAP. In his current role, Franklin travels the country, giving talks about how we need to end the war on drugs and develop policies for safer communities, beyond just the criminal justice system. I asked him why law enforcement agencies would put their officers like Jarrod Shivers in such dangerous situations if it isn’t necessary.  Neill Franklin: One of the reasons that the police use these SWAT teams making these dynamic entries for these low-level drug cases, they have to use things that we the public pay for them to have.  Radley Balko: A “dynamic entry” is when police use speed and the element of surprise to forcibly enter a location and quickly take control of it. Neill Franklin: Having a SWAT team with the weaponry, with the gear, with the vehicles having that specialized assignment — it’s expensive. It costs a lot of money. You have to train. Training is time, and time is money.  Related Texas Deployed SWAT, Bomb Robot, Small Army of Cops to Arrest a Woman and Her Dog These are actually training opportunities for them. And every time they use one of these SWAT teams, they can say, “Hey, we’ve used this SWAT team over the past month. We’ve used them 18, 19, 20, 30 times. So as you can see, we need this SWAT team. You have to fund this SWAT team. You can see how many times we use it.” But how many times did you really need it?  Radley Balko: The National Tactical Officers Association — the training and professional organization for SWAT teams — advises against conducting dynamic entries for drug warrants. They believe that approach should be reserved for situations like active shooters or dangerous fugitives. But if you are going to use these sorts of tactics, you should use a well-trained, full-time SWAT team.  Neill Franklin: If it’s a proper SWAT team, that’s what they do. They train all the time. Like military units. And they’re really good at what they do, regarding these dynamic entries. But, unfortunately, we do have a lot of drug units that have gotten some training — how to do this, how to do that, different things here and there, which can be very problematic. Radley Balko: The worst scenario is to send narcotics officers who lack the proper training to deploy these tactics on volatile, dangerous raids. But that’s partly what happened in this case. Jarrod Shivers had just 3 weeks of basic SWAT training.  The actual SWAT team didn’t arrive on scene until 20 minutes after Ryan Frederick was arrested. That’s also what happened in the raid that ended the life of Breonna Taylor, and many, many others. CBS: CBS Investigators exclusive. The city of Chicago is getting forced back to federal court over its failure to put a stop to bad police raids. RT: The police released over 70 rounds in a matter of about 7 seconds. Fox 26 Houston: The Galveston police chief is on administrative leave tonight amid an internal investigation into a botched SWAT raid. ABC 7 Chicago: Chicago police officers stormed into Anjanette Young’s home on February 22 2019, attempting to execute a search warrant. But records show the officers had the wrong home … Neill Franklin: Unfortunately, we’re measuring the effect of our policing by using numbers. We’re measuring output and not outcomes. So, for instance, how many arrests have you made this week? How many search warrants have you written this month? How many have you served this month?  “Unfortunately, we’re measuring the effect of our policing by using numbers. We’re measuring output and not outcomes.” So it’s a numbers game and it’s easier to not do the intelligence, to not take the time to gather the intelligence, to not do the proper recon. It’s just easier to kind of like have these what I call “cookie-cutter search warrants” to where you can just pump them out. And we just plug in a name here, plug in this there, plug in that there, a sentence here, whatever. It’s the same thing with serving them. And the more that we serve, it raises your value level in government. “Oh, we’re busy. We’re serving these searches, and we’re doing our job. We’re going after these people selling drugs. Look at how many search warrants we served.” And so you develop a system where you can serve as many of them as you can within a period of time. Just use the same dynamic entry over and over again, no matter how serious the violator or how low-level or high-level it is. Radley Balko: To the Chesapeake Police Department, Ryan Frederick was supposed to be just another checkmark. Another arrest. Another quantity of confiscated pot. But the moment the bullet Frederick fired went through Detective Shivers’s arm and into his chest, Frederick became a much, much bigger deal. He became a cop killer. Convicting him became a matter of defending Shivers’s honor, the department’s integrity, and his legacy for the family he left behind. Coming up next, the trial.  Break Ryan Frederick: The trial was mind-blowing. Radley Balko: At trial, the state tried to make Frederick seem like a monster, with claims that defied all credulity. In his opening statement, for example, prosecutor James Willett described Frederick as “stoned out of his mind” and “in an angry, blind rage.” Two descriptions which just about anyone who has ever smoked marijuana will tell you are laughably contradictory. Ryan Frederick: They made me out to be like, the devil, like, psychotic. Like, just ready to take on the world and shoot everybody. Cowboy wild wild West. Radley Balko: We reached out to prosecutor Willett for comment but we have not received a response as of this recording.  Because he spent 23 hours of each day in his cell, Frederick put on weight while he was in jail. His slight frame ballooned to 180 pounds. For this, prosecutors and one local newspaper columnist ridiculed him. During the trial, one prosecutor made him stand up so the jury could see his chubby profile, then asked, “You’re not exactly wasting away from regret and remorse now are you?” The state also called jailhouse informants to the witness stand, who claimed Frederick had boasted about killing Shivers. They said he even disparaged Shivers’s widow. Ryan Frederick: My lawyer comes up to me and he’s like, “Do you know any of these inmates?” And I’m like, “No.” And he was like, OK. So [the prosecutor’s] got nine inmates that are coming to testify against me with great stories. So I’m kind of feeling like, OK, this isn’t right because they’re cheating to prosecute me. These inmates, they start bringing them in — Lamont Malone was one — let them testify about me that I was bragging about killing [Shivers] and bragging about doing that to his family. And then the other one, Jamal Skeeter. He was telling everybody that I was bragging about it. Just really sick, cruel things, like, some really terrible things to say. And I get it, because the justice system has become “If you can help me, I can help you.” Radley Balko: Skeeter in particular was known to be untrustworthy. Mid-trial, one local prosecutor spoke up to say that he and other colleagues in Southeast Virginia had stopped using Skeeter in any of their cases. Prosecutors never publicly criticize a state’s witness in the middle of a trial, especially a trial for the murder of a police officer. That one did so in this case is a testament to just how preposterous the effort to convict Frederick had become. Ryan Frederick: I don’t know what compelled him to do that. He did not have to. My lawyer was blown away. And he said, he couldn’t sit well with himself knowing what he knew and how unreliable this guy was after the statement that he gave. Radley Balko: One narcotics officer told the jury that the handful of plants Wright and Turnbull took from Frederick’s garage would have brought in an estimated $64,000 per year in sales. The implication was that only a dealer would have that amount of pot. It was an absurd exaggeration, especially given that this particular alleged big-time drug dealer got up at 4 a.m. every morning to deliver Coca-Cola. But the really outrageous thing about the prosecution continuing to call witnesses painting Frederick as some callous, drug-slinging killer is that they had ample evidence that this was false — starting with Frederick’s recorded conversations with police on the night of the raid — first in a squad car, and then at the Chesapeake jail. In one of those videos, when Frederick was told in the squad car that he shot a police officer, he panicked and vomited. When he was later told at the jail that Shivers had died, Frederick started to shake. He screamed and vomited again, and then began hysterically crying. After the police left the room, Frederick curled up into a ball on the floor and wept. Ryan Frederick: And at that point I, I lost it. It was just like, shit, man. Fuck. Man, I, I don’t even know what just freakin happened. Oh my God. And, like, I took a dude’s life. There ain’t no words that I can say to make anyone feel better about losing someone. And there ain’t no words that somebody can make me feel better about taking someone. And I said from day one that I don’t want the story to be anything but what it is. But in that interrogation video, when they told me that he truly did pass, I was just sick about it, throwing up, throwing up, throwing up. Radley Balko: We tried to get that interview footage for this podcast, but local officials refused to hand it over. I personally watched the videos at the time of Frederick’s trial and even posted them on my website and that of the magazine I was working for at the time. Other contemporary media accounts are consistent with Frederick’s description of the interrogation.  The videos clearly showed a guy who was terrified and felt horribly about what he had done. And that’s precisely why prosecutors didn’t want the jury to see them. The state fought like hell to keep those videos out of the courtroom, calling them “self-serving.” Ryan Frederick: I don’t know truly why they didn’t want it in. I can only assume that it made me look more human and less villain. Because someone could see, you know, authentic human react — like what’s going down real time. Like, this is what it is. You can’t doctor this. This is the story for what it is. It’s not your side. It’s not his side. It is the story. And the story doesn’t change.  Radley Balko: The police detective who interrogated Frederick on the night of the raid also said Frederick was lucid, coherent, and responsive, and that his eyes weren’t bloodshot or dilated. In other words, not only did Frederick not kill Shivers in a blind pot-induced rage, he likely wasn’t even high. Frederick’s defense team expected that detective to testify, but were told that, coincidentally, he’d been sent out of state for training and wouldn’t be back until after the trial.  Fortunately, the state wasn’t able to keep this evidence away from the jury. The trial judge ruled that the interrogation tapes could be played in court and ordered the detective back to Virginia to testify. Despite those rulings, Frederick’s defense team had a major challenge in front of them. How do you convince a jury to sympathize with a pot smoker who had just killed a police officer? Ryan Frederick: My attorney spoke with me in detail about that. He said it was one of the more difficult cases he’d ever had to defend because he had to walk a fine line on defending me, but not tarnishing the officer’s name. “He said it was one of the more difficult cases he’d ever had to defend because he had to walk a fine line on defending me, but not tarnishing the officer’s name.” Neill Franklin: We look at crimes against police officers in this country different than what we do when we look at crimes against the average person. And I mean, psychologically, I get it, I understand it. When you have a team of police officers working and one of their team members is killed or severely wounded, then, yeah, the emotions come into play and it’s all hands on deck, we’re going to do whatever we can to catch this person. Then once we catch them, we’re going to make sure they’re prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Radley Balko: At one point, the prosecution even called Detective Shivers’s widow to testify. Families of murder victims often testify at sentencing, but there’s no reason for them to testify during the guilt phase of a trial unless they have some knowledge of what happened. Given that this case boiled down to whether Frederick should have known the people breaking into his home were police, there’s little Shivers’s wife could have added. The aim was clearly to elicit the jury’s sympathy and to stoke anger toward Frederick. In the end, the state’s aggressive and questionable tactics appear to have backfired. The jury did find Frederick guilty, but not of capital murder. Instead, they convicted him on the less serious charge of manslaughter. That difference suggests that they believed Frederick’s defense — that his actions that night may have been reckless, but they believed him when he said he didn’t know the man he shot was a police officer. Frederick was sentenced to 10 years in prison. And for killing a cop in the United States, that’s a pretty light sentence. Neill Franklin: If Mr. Frederick was of a different hue, a different color, I think we would be seeing different results. My color? Probably be in jail for a long time. Radley Balko: Frederick spent more than eight years behind bars. He was released in 2016. WAVY TV 10: And happening today, the man convicted of shooting and killing a detective is set to be released from jail. You may remember, Ryan Frederick shot and killed Detective Jarrod Shivers back in 2008 in Chesapeake during a drug raid. Radley Balko: Ryan Frederick is one of just a handful of people to have killed a police officer and lived to see the outside of a prison cell. As with anyone with a felony record though, life as a free man hasn’t been easy for him. Ryan Frederick: The hardest adjustment was finding a job. No one will touch me. The even bigger hurdle amongst all hurdles that I’ve had — and I fight it still to this day — I can’t rent a house unless I want to go into a drug-infested, crime-infested neighborhood.  “I know that, in my eyes, the way that the justice system and the police system works: If I get pulled over, and I get the right cop, I won’t go home.” I have yet to get pulled over. But the moment that a cop does get behind me, I am sweating profusely. I am shaky. If I’m on the phone, I’m telling somebody I got to get off the phone, there’s a cop behind me. And I’m not even on like talking with hands, just through Bluetooth. I am a wreck. I’m scared of them. I know that, in my eyes, the way that the justice system and the police system works: If I get pulled over, and I get the right cop, I won’t go home. Radley Balko: And despite the years in prison, the lingering trauma, and having to let go of the life he’d envisioned for himself back then, Frederick is still quick to point out that the ultimate victims of this story, the people who suffered the most dire consequences, are Detective Shivers and his family. Ryan Frederick: When I say, what a waste, it’s not even about me. It’s a waste of a good man that lost his life. I don’t know that he was a good man to everybody. But to some people, he was a good man. And I don’t know him from anybody. But that was a guy that — somebody smiled when they saw him. Radley Balko: Detective Shivers is dead because marijuana was illegal in Virginia, because anyone who used illegal drugs was considered a valid target, and because a police department’s narcotics officers had to justify their jobs. They had to generate arrests and confiscations.  Detective Shivers is dead because marijuana was illegal in Virginia, because anyone who used illegal drugs was considered a valid target, and because a police department’s narcotics officers had to justify their jobs. But 13 years after Shivers’s death, recreational marijuana was legalized in Virginia in 2021. Yet the war on pot continues in other states — as does the collateral damage. As we were researching this episode, a 16-year-old boy was shot and killed during a pre-dawn drug raid in Mobile, Alabama. WKRG: The shooting early Monday morning at Sheringham Drive left 16-year-old Randall Adjessom dead after an officer shot him for reportedly pointing a laser-sighted gun to police. Councilman William Carroll said the police conduct was not acceptable. William Carroll: The 16-year-old kid that was killed yesterday, wasn’t even the kid that we were looking for. That makes this 1,000 times worse. On a marijuana warrant? Come on, you know all the states right now making marijuana legal. Radley Balko: The police were looking for the boy’s brother, who was suspected of selling pot but wasn’t home at the time. The kid who was killed had grabbed a gun when he woke to the sound of armed men breaking into his home. WKRG: Randall’s mother told WKRG News 5 off-camera that she seen the body camera footage and sent a statement in response. “My son was murdered by two officers.” Ryan Frederick: They implement these tactics, but over what? Something that we now say, “Oh, well, we were wrong.” It’s not gonna make you jump off the building. It’s not gonna make, you know, the world go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Now, we were wrong, but what about all these people that lost their life fighting for your falsified agenda? Like, it’s sad. It’s a waste, man. It’s a big waste. Radley Balko: Defenders of aggressive, dynamic entry tactics say they’re necessary for the safety of police officers. But that’s hard to fathom. These raids create volatility and confrontation where there was none before. Kicking down doors in the middle of the night elicits a primal fight-or-flight response. And when you’re in your own home, flight isn’t an option. So fight is all that’s left. These raids create volatility and confrontation where there was none before. Officer Shivers is just one name on the list of police officers killed in these raids over the years. There’s Adam Sowders and Chuck Dinwiddie in Texas, FBI agent Samuel Hicks, and Joseph Whitehead in Georgia. And then there’s Ron Jones and the story that started my career in journalism. Back in 2001, Cory Maye, a 21-year-old Black man, lived in a duplex with his girlfriend and infant daughter in Prentiss, Mississippi. The man who lived next to him was suspected of selling drugs. But when police served their warrant on the neighbor, they raided both sides of the duplex. Maye, who had no prior criminal record, shot and killed a police officer during the raid. He then immediately surrendered. Here’s Neill Franklin again.  Neill Franklin: I had a good friend, Ed Toatley, who was killed making a drug buy that went wrong back in the year 2000. I knew other police officers who were killed while working undercover or even just out on patrol engaging people who were out there selling drugs. The reason it’s dangerous for police officers out there in the streets today is about the illicit drug trade. And again, a big reason for us being hated in many communities the way that we are today, is about enforcing these drug laws. And after spending trillions, trillions of dollars over the past few decades in prohibition drug laws, enforcing these laws — trillions at the federal, state, and local levels for cops, courtrooms, and prisons. Look at the addiction rates. Look at the overdose death rates. They continue to go up. They’re very high. So we’ve solved nothing there. Radley Balko: There are a couple codas to this story: The Chesapeake Police Department did finally order its own investigation into the raid on Ryan Frederick’s home. But that investigation didn’t focus on allegations that police informants were breaking into homes to obtain probable cause. It also didn’t question the volatile tactics for low-level offenses that got Detective Shivers killed. In fact, the investigation only recommended that officers get new tactical vests. And 16 years after the raid, public officials also continue to stifle any discussion about the case. We submitted an open records request for the audio and video of the police interrogations of Ryan Frederick. Those are the videos where Frederick sobs and vomits upon learning that Detective Shivers had died. We wanted listeners to hear for themselves just how far from the truth the prosecutors’ efforts to portray Frederick as some rage-driven killer really were. The videos had already been played in open court. They had even been previously released to the press. A local TV station had posted them, as had a local blog, and I had personally posted them on my own blog and to the website of the magazine where I worked at the time. But because the posts were made in a format that is now obsolete, those videos no longer work. Both the Chesapeake Police Department and the office of Commonwealth’s attorney rejected our request. The attorney’s office told us the videos do exist, but we would not be permitted to access them. This is absurd. Frederick was convicted in 2008 and released in 2016. There is no pending litigation related to his case. And again, the interviews have already been released to the public. In a conversation with our legal counsel, the Commonwealth’s attorney said he was refusing our request because he didn’t want to “reopen old wounds” or upset Detective Shivers’s family. He also demanded to know how we intended to use the video, and said he was concerned that we might edit or “splice” the interviews in a misleading way.  Virginia open records law grants law enforcement agencies broad discretion to refuse these requests. And while it’s certainly understandable why he wouldn’t want to provide more grief for Shivers’s family, those concerns are not enough to refuse such a request, especially for records that have already been made public. Moreover, state officials can’t put restrictions on journalists’ legitimate open records requests. Unfortunately, Virginia law also makes it extremely difficult to challenge a denial. So even ridiculous denials end up being the final word. It has now been over 16 years since Shivers’s death, eight years since Frederick was released, and over three years since recreational marijuana was legalized in Virginia. The war on marijuana is pretty much over in that state, but government officials still aren’t ready to talk about how it was fought. The war on marijuana is pretty much over in that state, but government officials still aren’t ready to talk about how it was fought. Radley Balko: Next time on Collateral Damage.  Sarah Stillman: Police could choose to do the work themselves but instead they outsource it to vulnerable people who are often on the hook in some way, including to kids, to teenagers.  Shawn Gaither: They were gonna set up one more drug buy that was gonna end in a bust. There’s no training for this. They don’t pack weapons to protect themselves. They are at the mercy of the people that are supposed to be watching over them. Radley Balko: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept.  It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko. Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor. Laura Flynn is our showrunner. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal. We had editing support from Maryam Saleh.  Truc Nguyen mixed our show.  Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow.  Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan. Art direction by Fei Liu. Illustrations by Tara Anand. Copy editing by Nara Shin. Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs. Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance.  This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund.  Thank you for listening. The post Episode Two: A Death in the Dark appeared first on The Intercept.