"Combatant Children"

Testament to depravity: Your Author and his son Justus at the Bear River Memorial.

 (This is an updated and expanded version of an essay originally published on the LewRockwell.com blog.)  

In the lexicon of official depravity, there are few if any expressions more despicable than the phrase “combatant children.” That term of art is inscribed on a plaque found at a memorial to the Bear River Massacre located just a few miles north of Preston, Idaho.

“The Battle of Bear River was fought in this vicinity January 29, 1863,” the official inscription lies, using the expression “battle” to describe an incident that is more honestly depicted as state-authorized mass murder. The attack was carried out because Shoshones gathered in the village had been designated, without due process, or even a perfunctory effort to provide evidence, as “guilty of hostile attacks on settlers and immigrants.”

A company of federal troops from California, under the command of the detestable Colonel (later General) Patrick Edward Connor, attacked a village of Shoshones at daybreak, killing at least 300 of them, “including about 90 combatant women and children.”

For the Indian men defending their village, the engagement was a battle against an immensely stronger aggressor. Some of the women might have joined in that effort, facing the enemy with desperate, doomed courage. There is no sense, however, in which the children could have been considered “combatants” – apart from the fact that they were murdered by agents of the US Government, which means that they could not possibly have been innocent.

Among the “combatants” who were defeated by Col. Connor’s bold and valiant troops was a young mother named Anzeechee, who “swam under an overhang on the bank and survived, head barely above water in the frigid shelter,” records historian Rod Miller in his book Massacre at Bear River: First, Worst, Forgotten. Her infant, however, was claimed by the pitiless river, his lifeless body “left to drift downstream amidst ice and swirling blood.” 

Once the assault on the village began, recalled a sergeant in an account written while he recovered from frostbite, “no officer was heeded or needed…. It was a free fight [with] every man on his own hook.” No military discipline was required, because the troops were not engaged in a military conflict. The men defending their homes and families mounted what resistance they could for an hour or two before being overwhelmed.

At that point, recalled another sergeant, “the work of death commenced in real earnest.” Shoshones repeatedly offered to surrender, the sergeant continued, “but there was no quarters that day.” Settlers who witnessed the onslaught described how many terrified and disarmed victims were channeled into a ravine, where there “were shot at arm’s length in the face.” Many were gunned down as they attempted to flee by casting themselves into the ice-choked river, or driven into a dense willow thicket on the river bank, where they were tracked down and killed by the troops.

A handful of the Shoshones were captured and allowed to live long enough to provide sadistic amusement for their captors. Bear Hunter, who had taken several rounds, was kicked, tortured, and then murdered by having a heated bayonet driven through one of his ears. A Shoshone survivor named Matigund testified that some of the “combatant” women were raped to death. Israel Clark, a local settler, collected several similar eyewitness accounts, describing to local Mormon leaders how soldiers had raped Shoshone women while they were “in the act of dying from their wounds.”

Yeager as an adult man.

As soldiers set fire to the village, a Shoshone child named Yeager -- who would be among the survivors -- was taken by his grandmother to a pile of bodies and told to feign death.

“When the soldiers came around prodding bodies with bayonets in order to extinguish any sign of lingering life, Yeager opened his eyes for a look, only to see a trooper looking back,” writes Miller. “The boy closed his eyes for a time, then opened them and found himself staring down the barrel of the same trooper’s gun. This soldier lowered the weapon and Yeager again closed his eyes. The ritual was repeated a third time, after which the soldier walked away” – his ardor for killing apparently extinguished.

Yeager was immensely fortunate. His brother Be-shup, who also survived, later recounted how the soldiers who carried out the massacre could be found “taking little infants by the heels and beating their brains out on any hard substance they could find.” After all, what other treatment is appropriate in dealing with “combatant children”?

William Hull, one of three people dispatched by the Mormon bishop in nearby Franklin, Idaho to search for Shoshone survivors the day after the massacre, described seeing “dead bodies everywhere. I counted eight deep in one place, and in several places they were three to five deep.”

 

Eyewitness to atrocities: Be-shup (aka Frank Warner).

This was the triumph of arms celebrated in the monument erected by the Department of the Interior in 1922. Several decades later, following a prolonged and justified outcry from Indian activists, that monument was clumsily revised by the attachment of a second plaque referring to the incident as a massacre. 

A larger display on the site attempts a dialectical reconciliation of those two versions, describing the incident as a “battle” that “became a massacre” without clearly acknowledging that the “battle” itself was an act of criminal aggression against innocent people.

Recalling the Massacre and the hostilities that precipitated it, local Mormon leader Peter Maughan pointed out that the supposedly hostile Shoshone and Paiute Indians “look upon the very lands we occupy as a portion of their inheritance.” While acknowledging that Indians had carried out raids and other acts of armed violence against settlers, Maughan urged his peers to “look at the catalogue of crimes perpetrated by the whites themselves, and ask who should cast the first stone.”

Not surprisingly, when Maughan died in 1871, local Indian leaders were conspicuous among attendees at the funeral of a man they praised because he “never had two tongues.”

After the Bear River Massacre, Col. Connor generously distributed “commendations” to subordinates who had distinguished themselves through their viciousness.

“Continuing with unflinching courage for over four hours, you completely cut him to pieces, captured his property and arms, destroyed his stronghold, and burned his lodges,” read a typical commendation written by Connor --the word “him” in this instance being used as a collective personification of the Indians as a single, nameless enemy.

It should be acknowledged that Indians were not the only enemies Connor intended to subdue. When he assumed command of Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City in 1862, Connor publicly denounced what he described as “persons who are endeavoring to destroy and defame the principles and institutions of our government.” According to Connor, “Traitors shall not utter treasonable sentiments in this district with impunity.”

With the Civil War underway and Indian children to butcher, Connor didn’t have the time or the means to chastise anti-government extremists. Those who subscribe to Freudian assumptions might wonder if the unprecedented sadism of the Bear River Massacre might have been an exercise in displaced rage by the commanding officer responsible for that crime.

P.E. Connor and the mass murder over which he presided continue to be honored in the institutional memory of the Regime that employed him, and killing “combatant children” continues to be an acceptable practice for those who do that Regime’s bidding. Among those who have explicitly endorsed the summary execution of “combatant children” is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who more recently described the family and supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy as “domestic terrorists.”

During a March 11, 2012 interview with CNN anchor Candy Crowley, Reid was asked about the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens – including 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awalki – who had been found “guilty” of terrorism without the benefit of due process.

While claiming not to know the details of the process behind those “targeted killings,” Reid declared: “I do know this – the American citizens who have been killed overseas … are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.”

“Those three,” once again, included a 16-year-old boy, a U.S. citizen, who was among a dozen or more people who were vaporized by drone-fired missiles while sitting down to dinner at a backyard barbecue.

"Terrorist" Ammon Bundy displays Taser wounds.

In addition to describing the Bundy family and supporters as “domestic terrorists,” Reid put into circulation the patent falsehood that they have used their children as “human shields” – a fabrication that was seized on, and embroidered even further, by Sgt. Tom Jenkins of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. 

That latter charge acquires genuinely ominous undertones in light of Reid’s explicit endorsement of the summary execution of “combatant children,” and the way that some Obama-adoring Progressives demanded that their Dear Leader dispatch drones to deal with the Bunkerville Rebellion.

It is worth remembering as well that the Department of the Interior, which includes the BLM, created the propaganda display north of Preston describing the children annihilated at Bear River as “combatants.”

Most importantly, we shouldn’t forget that lethal force training for contemporary law enforcement officers is designed to break down inhibitions against killing “combatant women and children.” This was the entire purpose of the notorious “No More Hesitation” training targets created by Minnesota-based Law Enforcement Targets, Inc. 

Following a public outcry, the company withdrew from circulation several of its training targets – which included pregnant women, children, and elderly people holding guns. But this is trivial cosmetic surgery in a Regime that routinely massacres “combatant children” by remote control overseas and continues to count terrified mothers and children among the enemies vanquished in its triumph at Bear River. 

Obiter Dicta

I'm working on what could be a very important -- and perhaps serialized -- local story, parts of which have already attracted national attention. Watch this space, and expect to see the first installment soon.

This Friday evening (May 16) I will be sharing the stage with Dick Heller, who was the plaintiff in a very significant Supreme Court decision dealing with the right to armed self-defense. (Full disclosure: I have misgivings about that ruling.) The event will take place at the BSU Student Union at 7:00, and admission is free. I will join Mr. Heller for another event at the Rexburg Tabernacle Civic Center this Saturday at 3:00. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Only "Extremists" Believe They Have a Right to be Left Alone

Eccentric, sure, but essentially harmless: Ernie terTelgte.

Ernie Wayne terTelgte is a poor man from a tiny village in Montana who believes that nature gives him a license to live. Barack Obama is a wealthy and privileged man residing at the seat of power who believes his position gives him a license to kill. Naturally, the Tolerance Commissars are pretending that the former is a menace to society, because of the contempt he displays for the system that facilitates the crimes committed by the latter. 

Last August, terTelgte was fishing at Three Forks Pond with his eleven-year-old son when they were accosted by Adam Pankratz, who is employed as a warden by the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Service. 

When Pankratz saw terTelgte reeling in a fish, the warden asked if he had a fishing license. TerTelgte replied that he didn’t need one. Pretending to concede the point, the warden persisted in demanding that terTelgte provide identification. When both teTelgte and his son quite sensibly refused the demand, Pankratz called for assistance, and Three Forks Police Officer Colter Metcalf quickly arrived.

 

Officer Metcalf.

Officer Metcalf made a brief and unsuccessful attempt to learn terTelgte’s identity.

Pankratz later said that he and Metcalf were concerned by the fact that terTelgte’s “body language” was “tense,” that his language was “curt,” and that he kept telling them to “walk away” and “just leave me alone.” This is a description of someone whose behavior was defensive. But Pankratz and Metcalf, as representatives of the coercive caste, insisted on escalating the encounter by arresting him for “obstruction.”

“We didn’t want it to go this far, especially with the son … but we couldn’t identify him,” Pankratz complained, assuming that a tax-funded aggressor is entitled to sympathy because of his occupation.

Since terTelgte had no legal duty to present identification (Montana code authorizes “stop and frisk”-style harassment of citizens, but doesn’t specify that citizens have a duty to identify themselves), the arrest was unlawful. As is the case elsewhere, Montana state statutes authorize police to abduct citizens without legal justification if this is done “under the peace officer’s official authority.”

Plucking a fish from a “publicly owned” pond without a license is considered an offense, despite the fact that entailed no violation of property rights. (If it did, who is the victim, and what injury did he sustain?) Violently abducting a human being who has done no harm to anyone, on the other hand, is regarded as a “lawful” act, assuming that the kidnapper is accoutered in the officially prescribed costume. 

Pankratz

To his credit, the victim was non-cooperative but non-violent. This wasn’t true of the assailants, of course. After Metcalf threatened to attack terTelgte with pepper spray, Pankratz kicked his legs out from beneath him. 

Rather than mounting a violent defense against his captors, terTelgte simply sat motionless on the ground, forcing them to pick him up and carry

him to the police car. 

During his arraignment before Three Forks Municipal Judge Wanda Drusch, terTelgte refused to defer to her authority or play his expected role as a penitent and submissive suspect. 

“I was searching for something to put in my stomach as I am … allowed to do by universal law,” he declared. “I am the living man and I have the right to forage for food when I am hungry.” 

The “trial” last November -- if the proceedings merit that description -- was attended by 32 police officers from ten agencies, brought together by shared concern that the defendant’s defiance might prove contagious. TerTelgte was denied the right—supposedly protected by the Constitution – to cross-examine witnesses or to introduce evidence on his own behalf. 

To the surprise of nobody, terTelgte was quickly found guilty of the supposed offense of obstructing the unwarranted harassment of armed state 

functionaries, and refusing to cooperate in his own abduction. Although his jail sentence was suspended, terTelgte later spent 30 days behind bars for “contempt” after he declined to take off his hat in the courtroom during a subsequent appearance on another charge of “resisting arrest.” 

TerTelgte is clearly eccentric; he might even be considered obnoxious by some. It is reasonable to conclude that his actions have been unwise, a violation of the principle that each of us has trouble enough and shouldn’t be seeking to borrow more. But he is patently harmless. There is no evidence that he has ever injured or defrauded anybody, which certainly can’t be said of the government functionaries who assaulted and caged him, or the criminal entity that employs them.

It is the zeal to prolong the pretense of the Regime’s legitimacy that led the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify terTelgte as a public enemy, an exponent of what that self-appointed Stasi calls “sovereign citizen ideology.”

Stated in its broadest terms, the “sovereign citizen” concept holds that some people can exempt themselves from the law through the use of esoteric legal concepts expressed in impenetrable language. From that perspective, people who utter or publish the appropriate conjurations can seize the property of others, issue fraudulent financial instruments, and employ lethal violence against those who seek to hold them accountable.

Assuming that this is an accurate description, at least some “sovereign citizens” are attempting to mimic the criminal behavior of those who presume to rule the rest of us. The SPLC and allied “watchdog” groups offer no objections to the routine practice of fraud and exercise of lethal aggressive violence by the most dangerous element of our society. They simply want to preserve that element’s monopoly on the privilege of committing criminal aggression.

This is why the SPLC professes alarm that outrage over the terTelgte case has prompted some Montana residents to create a citizens’ grand jury to investigate allegations of abuse and official misconduct. SPLC flack David Neiwert breathlessly – and perhaps hopefully – writes that this could lead to a rural “showdown” akin to the April 12 confrontation in Bunkerville, Nevada. 

William Wolf, who has organized efforts to create the citizens grand jury, has suggested that his group might arrest Rick West, the Justice of the Peace who sent terTelgte to jail for thirty days on a contempt charge. Gallatin County Sheriff Brian Gootkin described this as “unacceptable,” accusing Wolf and his allies of “crossing a line they can’t cross.”

“When there are threats like this, not only does it affect that person, it affects their family,” mewled Gootkin in a television interview. “For someone in the family to live in fear, that’s not the way things work. When you start talking about arresting people and kidnapping people … that’s unacceptable and nothing good comes from that.”

It’s appropriate that Gootkin uses the terms “arrest” and “kidnap” interchangeably, given that the latter is properly applied to what was done to terTelgte. The public record is barren of any recognition by Sheriff Gootkin that terTelgte’s abduction traumatized his eleven-year-old son and made him “live in fear.” Apparently the impact of violence on Mundanes and their children doesn’t concern the Sheriff. 

Gootkin also berated members of the proposed citizens’ grand jury for “bypassing” the criminal justice system. The real scandal here is the effective destruction of the grand jury, which was intended to be a citizens’ assembly rather than a government entity. 

From the Founding era until the early 20^th Century, grand juries were bodies that could carry out independent investigations of official corruption and deliver “presentments” to prosecutors in search of redress. Constitutional scholar Roger Roots observes that the grand jury, “in its primal, plenary sense … was a group of men who stood as a check on government, often in direct opposition to the desires of those in power.” 

Writing in the Fordham Law Review, Kevin K. Washburn points out that the grand jury “came to us as an institution that was respected for its profound ability to protect local communities – indeed, possibly rebellious ones – from central government authority. It was, in essence, a local check on Crown authority.” In that capacity, grand juries not only conducted rigorous review of facts, but also “nullification of validly enacted laws,” Washburn continues.

During the reign of FDR, an executive branch Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure – an unaccountable body with no legislative mandate – imposed regulations intended to destroy the independence of grand juries. As a result, “the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor, who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury,” wrote federal District Judge William J. Campbell, who urged the formal abolition of the institution in the interests of efficiency.

Judge Campbell offered those observations in 1973. Since that time, the US criminal “justice” system has reached almost Soviet levels of prosecutorial efficiency. Under the reign of Josef Stalin, Soviet procurators were ordered to achieve a 100 conviction rate. In the current federal system, notes Lew Rockwell, the defendant “wins once every 212 times.”

Once the grand jury was re-purposed as an arm of the state, prosecutors were free to commit routine due process violations and destroy what remained of the institution of trial by jury. “Waiving the Criminal Justice System,” a study recently published by the University of Texas School of Law, describes how the adversarial process through which the state must prove the guilt of a defendant has been supplanted with a system of administrative law in which prosecutors extract plea bargains in exchange for relatively lenient sentences. This is why federal prosecutors win well more than ninety percent of their cases through plea bargains, rather than jury trials.

This is a lamentable state of affairs, and, to many observers, a familiar story. This study, however, breaks new ground by showing that prosecutors at both the state and federal levels require defendants to waive   due process rights that are vital for post-conviction appeals – such as the right to effective assistance of counsel, and the right to obtain exculpatory evidence that can be used to overturn a conviction or at least obtain a new trial.

The Montana Militia? No -- the Gallatin County SRT.

In the American tradition, the purpose of a trial was to establish the truth of an accusation against a defendant who is presumed to be innocent. The purpose of our post-constitutional criminal system is to ratify the defendant's guilt, irrespective of the facts or the law. 

This is not the doing of eccentrics and “extremists” like Ernie terTelgte, but rather of the respectable people who employ the exercise and the threat of violence to force others to submit to their will – and who can rely on the unconditional support of the SPLC and others of their contemptible ilk.

Roughly a week ago, while the SPLC was pretending that terTelgte and his supporters are a threat to the republic, the US Supreme Court put an end to the illusion that something worthy of being called a republic still exists, or that citizens have any reasonable expectation that, if accused of an offense, they have a right to a trial of some kind.

The High Court refused to hear an appeal filed by Chris Hedges and several other activists challenging a provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act under which the president can order the indefinite military detention – without trial or legal recourse -- of any U.S. citizen he regards as an enemy of the state. 

The SPLC is cool with this: SWAT training in Gallatin County.

That provision was struck down as unconstitutional by US District Judge Katherine Forrest, who ruled that it could lead to the seizure and imprisonment of people who exercised rights supposedly protected by the First Amendment. 

As is their habit, the executive branch’s legal minions greeted that ruling with an indifferent shrug and filed an appeal before a more complaisant federal judge, who ruled that no citizen has legal standing to challenge the NDAA. That ruling was left undisturbed by the Supreme Court.

As a result, summarizes progressive commentator Thom Hartman, the military “now has the power to label us terrorists, capture us, lock us up in jail, and hold us there without any regard for our Constitutional rights to due process or a fair trial.” That power very nicely compliments Obama’s routine practice of executing people without the benefit of trial – including at least one teenaged U.S. citizen.

Ernie terTeglte’s view of sovereignty is that he has a right to feed himself and be left alone. Barack Obama’s view of sovereignty is that of Vladimir Lenin – the supposed right of the Dear Leader to exercise “power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.” Not surprisingly, the SPLC and its allies consider the first view unacceptable, and regard the second as mandatory.

Dum spiro, pugno!

One Killer Cop, One Black-Bag Job, One Terrified Wife: The Ordeal of Patrice Teuton

(For illustration only.)

 

Patrice Teuton is convinced that her estranged husband, a soon-to-be-disbarred Los Angeles attorney named Mark Teuton, intends to kill her. Her adult son Jonathan is convinced that she is right. 

“I am extremely worried for the safety of my mother, my brother, my sister, and myself,” wrote Jonathan in an April 29 letter to the California Bar Association. “I, personally, have witnessed him beat my family members, abuse drugs, [and] threaten to kill people…. If he is not stopped, then he will kill one of us. It’s just a matter of time.” 

Similar concerns have been voiced by a doctor who has been treating Mark for emotional problems and has reportedly described him as a violent sociopath. A video of a violent encounter between an erratic, knife-wielding Mark and his terrified wife tends to corroborate that characterization.

 

If – God forbid – Patrice's worst fears are consummated, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy Julio Jove should be prosecuted as an accomplice. Jove helped Mark track down the would-be victim -- who had been relocated for her safety -- and held her in jail while the estranged husband burgled her home.

About two years ago, Patrice filed for divorce. In January, she obtained an order of protection and moved into a safe house in Orange County. According to Patrice’s attorney, David Scharf, her husband reacted by “threatening to have her arrested” and promising that he would “see her in jail.”

At daybreak on March 20, Patrice was startled awake by an insistent pounding on the front door. When she answered she was shoved aside by several deputies who, without permission or explanation, surged into her home with their guns drawn.

 

Det. Jove in casual attire.

The officer in charge of the thugscrum was Detective Jove, with whom Patrice had spoken three days earlier. Patrice had called Jove after learning that the detective was investigating her in connection with the alleged theft of items from her husband's car.

“Mark had violated the protective order by calling me to say I could get some things belonging to Jonathan [the couple’s 23-year-old son] from his car,” Patrice explained to me. “After we retrieved my son's belongings I found out that Detective Jove was investigating me for some reason.”

Detective Jove later claimed that he was investigating the theft of several items from Mark's car. The March 20 raid was conducted pursuant to a “Ramey warrant,” which indicates that Jove was already planning to arrest Patrice when she contacted him three days earlier. If he had legitimate suspicions about Patrice, he neglected an opportunity to clear the case without further trouble by talking with a cooperative suspect.

Instead, Jove “told me that he had no questions to ask, and no information he could give me,” Patrice recalled to me in a phone interview. “I also let him know about the protective order against Mark, who was stalking and harassing me. Under the terms of that order, Mark was not permitted to call me, and he wasn't allowed to know where I was living, and I explained that to Jove. I also gave him the name of other law enforcement officers who had been in contact with us and knew the details of our situation. I explained all of this to him just a few days before the cops raided my home at daybreak, supposedly in search of property that had been stolen from Mark.”

Mark Teuton

The property in question consisted of two laptop computers that had been purchased with family funds and would be considered the family's “community property” under California law, since the divorce has not been finalized. 

Patrice believes that Mark wanted access to information on the laptop computers dealing with alleged sexual and financial misconduct, which would play a significant role in divorce proceedings. However, Mark didn't know Patrice's passwords, and since she was living in an undisclosed location he had no way of getting them from her.

By inviting Patrice to collect the laptop computers, and then reporting them as “stolen,” Mark effectively enlisted Detective Jove and his comrades as accomplices in a home invasion robbery. The confiscated property wasn’t turned over to the Magistrate’s office, as required by law. Instead, the laptops were handed to Mark, along with an Apple desktop computer that Patrice had purchased by herself.  

“After seizing my client's property under the claim of a warrant, Dep. Jove took her computer and her other property and immediately gave it to Mark Teuton,” recounted attorney David Scharf in his detailed letter to the District Attorney's office. “Releasing property that has been obtained under a search warrant is a blatant violation of the law.” The same is true of Jove's refusal to provide the search warrant and the return when Scharf filed a formal request for those documents.

After the police invaded her home, Patrice offered documentation proving legal ownership of the supposedly stolen computers, to no avail. Jove and his comrades weren't there to solve a crime, but rather to commit one.

“In front of my 14-year-old daughter these deputies pushed me, handcuffed me, and verbally abused me,” Patrice told me. “They had no justification for this, and they knew it. They also knew about my health problems” – she suffers from Lupus and coronary artery disease – “but this didn't make any difference. They took me to the hospital, then dragged me off to jail.”

Despite the burden of her parents’ impending divorce, Patrice’s daughter Natalie has maintained a 4.0 GPA in her high school. The illegal confiscation of the Apple desktop computer by “armed government workers” placed her academic life in jeopardy, Natalie explained in a letter to Detective Jove, because it “contained all of my school assignments, essays, and notes.”

Not content to confiscate Natalie’s schoolwork, the intruders attempted to do essentially the same thing to her. One of them led the 14-year-old to a waiting vehicle and told her that she would be in the company of a social worker. The driver was actually Mark's girlfriend, who was a complete stranger to both Natalie and her mother.

“This woman Natalie didn't know kept telling her, `Don't worry, it will all be over soon, and you'll be with your father,'” Patrice recalled. “During the entire trip this woman was recording my daughter and trying to get her to say damaging things about me.”

Patrice would later learn that after she had been arrested, Detective Jove called Mark and told him, “I have your daughter. What do you want me to do with her?”

“I was given sole custody of Natalie, and the order of protection specified that Mark was to have no contact with either of us,” Patrice observed. “He hadn't paid us a single dollar in child support, and was facing both disbarment and contempt of court – yet after Jove arrested me, he tried to turn my daughter over to her abusive father, as well as giving him my address and a huge amount of confidential information he was not legally entitled to have.”

Mark Teuton confronts his wife.

Natalie returned to the safe house, where she stayed with her adult brother until Patrice was released from jail. Once she was home, Natalie noticed that the doors had been left open. A quick inventory of the family’s belongings revealed that someone had taken a black book containing Patrice's computer passwords, as well as two large binders filled with receipts, financial records, and other materials that had been gathered for divorce hearings.

The raid happened on a Thursday morning. Patrice was able to arrange bail by late that afternoon – yet she was held, without necessity or justification, for more than three days. No charges against Patrice were ever formally filed. The purpose of arresting her was simply to get her out of the home long enough for her husband to carry out a black-bag job.

Scharf concludes that while Patrice was held in custody – despite posting bail – her husband, who was forbidden to have any contact with her, “gained access to her home and stole the black book and the two binders containing documentary evidence obtained by Patrice proving Mark was actively hiding assets intended for use in the final divorce trial. No one else on earth would have any interest in these items and only Mark would know that there would be no one at the residence while Patrice was being arrested. It is significant to note that for no apparent reason Jove deactivated the security camera recording system installed by Patrice” before she was taken to jail.

Jove arrested Patrice without cause, confiscated her property and illegally transferred it to her ex-husband, facilitated the near-kidnapping of her teenage daughter, disabled her home security, and then prolonged her unwarranted detention to allow her ex-husband to steal critical evidence in a civil case. Jove did this in knowing violation of a protective order, acting outside his jurisdiction to aid and abet a man regarded as an immediate, and potentially lethal, threat to his wife and children.

“I know Mark,” Patrice was reportedly told in her home by an Orange County deputy who had served papers to him. “You need to protect yourself because Mark will kill you in seconds, and I can’t get here for minutes.”

As Scharf pointed out in his letter to the Los Angeles DA’s office, Patrice would have been able to protect herself – were it not for the intervention of Detective Jove: “The simple fact is that Patrice Teuton's life is in danger and Jove has been facilitating a stalker with his violations of law and perjury.”

Accusations of sexual and financial misconduct are typical in divorce cases, and it’s hardly unheard of for one deeply alienated spouse to obtain a protective order by falsely accusing the other of harboring violent intentions. The fears expressed by Patrice, her son Jonathan, and her best friend, were considered plausible by the judge who issued the protective order. While that isn’t a particularly challenging hurdle to cross, it does suggest that the wisest course of action would have been for Patrice and her daughter to be left unmolested in their safe house until the divorce was finalized.

The husband in this dispute, however, enjoyed the advantage of impunity-by-proxy – that is, he was able to persuade police officers to commit illegal acts under the color of “law.” Detective Jove was in a position to help because he has literally gotten away with murder.

In October 2010, Detective Jove shot and killed a 20-year-old man named Jonathan Cuevas who had been jaywalking across a street on Long Beach Boulevard in Lynwood. Jove rolled up to Cuevas and several friends and flashed a spotlight on them. Cuevas, who was not a criminal suspect, bolted. Video provided by a security camera shows Jove shooting several times at the fleeing man, who falls to the ground and is dispatched execution-style once the officer reaches him.

In his report, Jove dutifully recited from the police officer’s catechism of self-exoneration, claiming that the “unusual behavior” of Cuevas and his friends led him to believe that they were “setting him up for an ambush” – despite the fact that he was the one who initiated the contact. When Jove demanded that Cuevas show him his hands, he “quickly turned his upper body,” which prompted the high-strung officer to shoot at him. As Cuevas fled, he stopped long enough to turn and “blade his body” at the officer, who fired several more rounds.

After Cuevas fell, Jove continued, the victim could be seen “aggressively moving his shoulders from side to side” while screaming, “You f****g shot me!” Honest and rational people would describe this behavior as “writhing in agony.” As someone deeply indoctrinated in the officer safety uber alles dogma and given authorization to lie, Jove insisted that his victim’s death throes left him “in fear for his life,” which supposedly meant he was justified in firing “two to three rounds from his service weapon” at point-blank range.

Jove’s incident report claimed that Cuevas pulled a handgun from his waistband. A gun was allegedly found at the scene, but Cuevas’s fingerprints weren’t on the weapon and there is nothing in the surveillance video corroborating Jove’s claim that Cuevas ever reached for it or threatened him in any way. Additionally, the firearm provided to the family’s attorney as part of civil discovery was not the silver-handled gun supposedly found on the scene. 

Execution-style shooting of Cuevas by Jove.

The video “doesn’t show that he makes a threat to the officer,” insisted Mayra Murrillo, the mother of Cuevas’s son, who was a newborn when his father was killed. “He’s running. He gets shot in the back and he falls down and the officer stands over him and continues to shoot him.”

Seven months after Jove killed Cuevas, the LA County DA’s office, presiding over the familiar liturgy of institutional immunity, ruled that the killer “acted in lawful self-defense” when he shot a fleeing man in the back and then administered the coup-de-grace at intimate range. Last September, the county paid $875,000 to settle a $5 million wrongful death suit brought on behalf of the victim’s son.

No punitive action was taken against Detective Jove, which left him in a position to terrorize an innocent woman on behalf of her estranged and allegedly abusive husband, which is precisely the kind of service reasonable people expect from the degenerate racket called "law enforcement."

Dum spiro, pugno!