Testimony ended Thursday in the trial of Demetrius Colbert of Marianna, the last of four accused major drug dealers indicted in 2011 as part of an FBI-led investigation into drug trafficking and public corruption in Lee and Phillips counties, an inquiry known as Operation Delta Blues.
Colbert, 38, didn't testify, and the defense presented no witnesses. U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr. sent jurors home in midafternoon with instructions to return to his Little Rock courtroom at 9 a.m. today for closing arguments and deliberations.
Earlier in the day, Colbert's common-law wife, Catina Davis, described from the witness stand how it felt to be awakened shortly after 4 a.m. on Oct. 11, 2011, by unfamiliar loud noises as a team of FBI agents executed a search warrant at the couple's Marianna home.
Davis said the commotion confused and frightened her and her two young children, who were asleep in a bedroom at the front of the house, and that Colbert told her, "Somebody's trying to break in!"
Davis said she'd been asleep with Colbert in the master bedroom, which looked out on the front and side of the house. She said she got up and made her way into her children's adjacent room, which had two side-by-side windows facing the front of the house and was just to the left of the front door.
Not sure how to protect them, she said, "I remember laying on top of them," covering their bodies with hers.
She said that when she first saw her son, Demetrius Jr., lying motionless on his back, she thought he was dead or injured. Her daughter, the older child, "had the cover up over her ears," she remembered.
FBI agents testified Wednesday that after quietly lining up outside the house, they banged on the door three times and yelled, "FBI! Warrant! Open the door!" seconds before using a steel battering ram to knock in the front door. At the same time, they said, a state trooper flipped on the blue lights of his marked car, which was parked in the driveway near the front door, and another officer activated the blue lights in his sport utility vehicle to help identify the men as law enforcement officers.
One FBI agent said he tossed a flash-bang device into the dark house to disorient the residents so that the officers could have a chance to visually assess the house's layout and any furnishings or threats.
Davis, however, testified that she never heard anyone say "FBI" or "search warrant." She said all she could hear were loud noises, some of which she recognized as gunfire, and that the house soon filled with smoke.
An FBI firearms expert testified Thursday that eight shots were fired from inside the house and five shots were fired from the outside in, as supported by evidence later collected from the scene. Agents reported finding a recently fired black .40-caliber Glock handgun, its empty magazine lying beside it, on top of a cabinet in the master bathroom in the rear of the house.
Agents say a large-caliber bullet fired from inside the house passed through the thigh of an agent who helped breach the front door and who was standing on the front porch.
Davis said that when she made it into the living room and saw the front door open, she shouted, "My kids are in the house! Don't shoot!"
"That's when one of the Army guys said come out with your hands up," she said, adding that that was the first time she heard anyone identify the intruders as FBI agents. No military forces were involved in executing the search warrant.
Davis told Assistant U.S. Attorney Benecia Moore that houses where she and Colbert had lived had been broken into four times, but that she didn't know why anyone would want to rob them.
Inside the house, agents said they found expensive jewelry, $423,000 in cash and a small amount of cocaine. Davis acknowledged that the family had several flat-screen televisions, noting that Colbert once ran a clothing business and an auto-detailing business, and, "Maybe they thought he had a lot of money."
She denied knowing that he sold drugs.
Moore played a recording of a May 2, 2011, telephone call that was intercepted by the FBI in which Davis told Colbert what to say to a caseworker from the state Department of Human Services who was inquiring about the couple's source of income after Davis applied for public assistance.
"The last time you worked was 2008," she said. "Just tell her you're trying to open your own business."
From the witness stand, Davis said she didn't report any income to the caseworker "because I was in the process of getting my day care open."
FBI Agent James Woodie testified a short time later that he checked records back to 2007 and found that Davis had applied for food stamps, transitional employment assistance and Medicaid. He said she had reported as recently as June 9, 2011, on a form seeking assistance, that she and Colbert had no income and no savings, and owed monthly utility bills.
Woodie also testified that he checked the title history of several cars that Colbert was known to drive, including an antique Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible, a blue Cadillac Escalade, a 2002 BMW, a 2002 Chevrolet Corvette and a Range Rover, and found that three of them, as well as a Mercedes that Davis drove, were titled in her name, while others were titled under the names of Colbert's uncle and his half brother.
Moore played for jurors a recorded, FBI-intercepted telephone call made on June 9, 2011, in which Davis yelled at Colbert, telling him his insurance payments on several vehicles were due that day and that taxes on some of the vehicles were overdue. At one point, she said, "You can just transfer all that paperwork over to your name and let the taxes be on you."
Woodie testified that during a 60-day period in the spring of 2011, the FBI overheard many calls in a wiretap that were related to the renovation of another house in Helena-West Helena where the couple also lived. He remembered discussions about the purchase and installation of granite countertops and new flooring, in particular. When he later went to the house, he said, he saw furniture that "was so new it still had the tags on it from Cleo's."
Metro on 06/06/2014