Reply
Tue 7 Jun, 2005 05:01 pm
Man With Chain Saw Allowed to Enter U.S.
By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press Writer 53 minutes ago
BOSTON - On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.
The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton's kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.
Despres, 22, immediately became a suspect because of a history of violence between him and his neighbors, and he was arrested April 27 after police in Massachusetts saw him wandering down a highway in a sweat shirt with red and brown stains. He is now in jail in Massachusetts on murder charges, awaiting an extradition hearing next month.
At a time when the United States is tightening its borders, how could a man toting what appeared to be a bloody chain saw be allowed into the country?
Bill Anthony, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the Canada-born Despres could not be detained because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and was not wanted on any criminal charges on the day in question.
Anthony said Despres was questioned for two hours before he was released. During that time, he said, customs agents employed "every conceivable method" to check for warrants or see if Despres had broken any laws in trying to re-enter the country.
"Nobody asked us to detain him," Anthony said. "Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. ... We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations."
Anthony conceded it "sounds stupid" that a man wielding what appeared to be a bloody chain saw could not be detained. But he added: "Our people don't have a crime lab up there. They can't look at a chain saw and decide if it's blood or rust or red paint."
Sgt. Gary Cameron of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would not comment on whether it was, in fact, blood on the chain saw.
On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton's son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August.
Mowat told police Despres had been bothering his father-in-law for the past month. When Mowat confronted him, Despres allegedly pulled a knife, pointed it at Mowat's chest and said he was "going to get you all."
Police believe the dispute between the neighbors boiled over in the early-morning hours of April 24, when Despres allegedly broke into Fulton's home and stabbed to death the musician and 70-year-old Veronica Decarie.
Fulton's daughter found her father's body two days later. His car was later found in a gravel pit on a highway leading to the U.S. border. Despres hitchhiked to the border crossing.
After the bodies were found on the afternoon of April 26, police set up roadblocks and sent out a bulletin that identified Despres as a "person of interest" in the slayings, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The bulletin caught the eye of a Quincy police dispatcher because it gave the suspect's Massachusetts driver's license number, missing a character. The dispatcher plugged in numbers and letters until she found a last known address for Despres in Mattapoisett. She alerted police in that town, and an officer quickly spotted Despres.
In state court the next day, Despres told a judge that he is affiliated with
NASA and was on his way to a Marine Corps base in Kansas at the time of his arrest.
After the case was transferred to federal court, Despres' attorney, Michael Andrews, questioned whether his client is mentally competent.
Fulton's friends in Minto, a village of 2,700 people, told the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal that he was a popular musician, a guitarist known as the "Chet Atkins of Minto" and a 2001 inductee in the Minto Country Music Wall of Fame.
thank god the dept of homeland security is on the ball.
had the guy smell like weed they would have done a full body cavity search on him
With my luck I wouldn't have made it with a Swiss army knife.
Quote:Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up...
But,
BEING Muslim or of Middle-Eastern appearance.......
All too true. Clearly it is not a level playing field. I may be a little obtuse but a bloody saw usually makes me a little nervous.
And if the Agents of the "Evil American Government" [size=7](TM)[/size] had detained this man without any reasonable expectation of him being guilty of anything and it turned out later that he had not been guilty of anything, you all would be squealing like stuck pigs about how the "Evil American Government" [size=7](TM)[/size] was holding innocent people at the border and keeping people then from going about their normal lives.
You don't want a government that guards the border, you want mind readers.
Pah! Mind readers.........a chain saw with apparent blood and other "wierdo" parapernalia.....even the most liberal of Americans would not have had much of a problem with this guy being checked out properly.
Methinks you are trying for an argument Mr Fedral. Well, It is a lovely sunny day and I have some plants to put into tubs.
Bye.
Lord Ellpus wrote:Pah! Mind readers.........a chain saw with apparent blood and other "wierdo" parapernalia.....even the most liberal of Americans would not have had much of a problem with this guy being checked out properly.
Methinks you are trying for an argument Mr Fedral. Well, It is a lovely sunny day and I have some plants to put into tubs.
Bye.
Lets see what the man owned and see what was so wrong:
A homemade sword: I am a medieval re enactor and own 3 of them and transport them all over the country as I go to various events.
A hatchet: Yes, one of the most basic tools that man has had since we came out of the caves... we should lock up everyone who owns one of these.
A knife: I don't know about you, but everytime I see someone with a knife, the first thing I think to myself is "This guy must have killed someone"
Brass knuckles: A little uncommon, but I own two sets myself that my father left me. Yet I don't recall killing anyone.
A chain saw: I have done landscaping for a lot of years and own 3 of them, I guess that makes me a murdering psycho. If there had been anything on my chainsaws that was unidentifiable, am I expected to have the police hold me until all the forensic tests get back on my tools?
What you call "Wierdo paraphanalia" many of us own for many legitimate reasons, unless you think that the government has a right to break in my door for having an unidentifiable substance on my tools?
Exactly when did a discussion of crossing an international border become one of what might lead the government to kick in your door? Certainly there are many on the right who fondly cherish such an image, it fits right in with their silly fantasy about using their firearms to protect themselves against a brutal, repressive government (which these days is controlled by right-wing Republicans--ah, the irony!).
This is about crossing an international border, not driving around to re-enactments. When i cross the border with Canada, i know in advance that i cannot have anything in the way of a weapon larger than a pocket knife. I know i cannot carry firearms with me, nor even a can of mace or pepper spray. That this clown made it across a border with a chain saw and a hatchet is a serious comment on the failure of the border crossing personnel to do their job.
Good God, Fedral....you're really a sweety of a liberal at heart, aren't you!
Maybe you should start a petition to get these things allowed back into "carry on" luggage for your internal flights.
Setanta wrote:
This is about crossing an international border, not driving around to re-enactments. When i cross the border with Canada, i know in advance that i cannot have anything in the way of a weapon larger than a pocket knife. I know i cannot carry firearms with me, nor even a can of mace or pepper spray. That this clown made it across a border with a chain saw and a hatchet is a serious comment on the failure of the border crossing personnel to do their job.
To quote the article:
Quote:U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.
Now, if the man had been a landscaper or arborist, and worked both sides of the border, would you expect that Customs would confiscate the tools of his trade everytime that he worked for someone across the line.
Thats just crazy.
If he were involved in such work, he would have to have documents to cross to the Canadian side, and these would have been evident when he crossed back to the American side. You're right, it's just crazy to try to dream up some feeble excuse which suggests that this would ever be seen as normal.
Please define how brass knuckles is a tool of the trade.
Lord Ellpus wrote:Good God, Fedral....you're really a sweety of a liberal at heart, aren't you!
Maybe you should start a petition to get these things allowed back into "carry on" luggage for your internal flights.
Wow, it must be Backwards Day or something. Now the liberals are the defenders of personal freedoms and privacy? Usually this is the domain of the libertarians.
I've crossed that border dozens of times--i've seen a lot of idiotic stuff. Crossing from Detroit to Windsor, the busiest border crossing in the world, i saw one idiot pulled over by the immigration people--who wear kevlar vests and carry machine pistols at night--because he had a trunk full of shotguns. With the then new gun law in Canada, he thought he'd just nip over and make a tidy black-market profit, and no one the wiser. Almost every time i cross, it is routine to be asked if i have firearms, knives with a blade longer than 3", mace or pepper spray. One idiot crossing from Queenston to Lewiston, New York, on a Fourth of July weekend, when it required three hours to got the final five miles to the crossing, decided he would assert himself, and he told the immigration lady he wouldn't open the trunk of his car. In a flash, half-a-dozen INS agents surrounded the car, they were all wearing kevlar, and they all had nine millimeters in their hands, pointed at him. Without even looking at her, one agent told the woman to get slowly out of the car, take the keys and open the trunk. One idiot at Lewiston one day had his van searched, and was found attempting to smuggle hundreds of tropical fish in plastic baggies in picnic coolers.
When my sweetiepie and i crossed from Maine to Québec in the backwoods, at a little one lane check point, they had some sorry looking joker pulled over there--because the normal rule for border crossing agents is that if anything looks suspicious, pull 'em over and check it out. These jokers weren't doing their job when they let that clown through.
I have a sneaking suspicion that just as the Mexican/USA border is being penetrated there are just as many citizens of the US moving North and learning to add the word 'ehh' to their sentences.
Folks, you are safe with the legacy of King George the Third!! The Commonwealth of Nations, join us in the Faark Side..... now!
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace