--
(I may be wrong, but I don't believe they knocked on the door at Waco.
Did they?)
MONDAY
MAY 1
2000
THE BOY WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Donato: 'They
never knocked'
Man who saved Elian describes
government's violent Easter raid
Editor's note: In collaboration with the hard-hitting
Washington, D.C. newsweekly Human Events,
WorldNetDaily presents this special report every
Monday. Readers can subscribe to Human Events
through WND's on-line store.
© 2000, Human Events
"They never knocked," said Donato Dalrymple,
the man who scooped Elian Gonzalez from the
sea last year. "They never announced and then
waited for 20 seconds." Nor did they present a
warrant.
What if they had knocked?
"I would have opened
the door to be honest
with you," said
Dalrymple. But there
was no knock. They
just came in with a
battering ram and
started busting up the
house.
They were
machine-gun toting
agents of the Border
Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization
Service ordered by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to
seize a six-year-old boy at gunpoint as he slept
in his great-uncle's house.
In an interview with the editors of Human
Events last Thursday, Donato Dalrymple, the
40-year-old operator of a Fort Lauderdale
house-cleaning service, described what he saw
inside the home of Lazaro Gonzalez when it was
raided by federal agents in the wee morning
hours of Easter Saturday.
Along with his cousin Sam Ciancio, a sport
fisherman, Dalrymple discovered Elian
Gonzalez clinging almost lifeless to an inner
tube as it bobbed in the waters off Miami last
Thanksgiving.
The boy had been at sea for four days. He had
seen his mother, her boyfriend and both of the
boyfriend's parents drown.
Their quest had been to reach America -- and
freedom -- risking all to escape Fidel Castro's
tyranny. But of all the family members who had
embarked from the city of Cardenas, Cuba, in a
homemade aluminum boat, only Elian had
made it.
Many in Miami's Cuban community considered
his survival an act of God -- a miracle. Donato
Dalrymple was there when the miracle was
consummated just off the Florida coast -- and he
was there the moment the Clinton Justice
Department turned it into a nightmare in a
two-bedroom Miami bungalow.
In the months since he had found Elian at sea,
Dalrymple had developed a bond with the boy
as well as with the Florida branch of the
Gonzalez clan that had taken custody of him in
Miami. Almost every day, he would break off
work at about 4 p.m., so he could visit the
Gonzalez house and play with the boy.
Every day at 8 p.m., like clockwork, great-uncle
Lazaro would send Elian off to bed, but
Dalrymple often would hang around chatting
with family members for an hour or two, then
drive home to Fort Lauderdale.
On Good Friday, however, he was too tired
from work to make the trip to Little Havana.
Arriving home, he drifted off to sleep on a
couch. Then at 10 p.m., he awoke to hear an
alarming bulletin on the radio: The Justice
Department would likely take custody of Elian
within 24 hours.
Dalrymple dressed quickly, jumped in his car,
and headed to the Gonzalez home. "My soul
was tearful," he said. "I was broken on the inside
as I was driving down there -- never turned on
the radio, just praying." He wanted to say
goodbye to Elian before the government took
him away.
He arrived in Little Havana at about 10:30 p.m.,
parked a few blocks from the house, and
requested permission from the Miami police to
pass through the barricades. Inside the home, he
was surprised to find the mood optimistic, not
gloomy.
Two of Elian's lawyers, Manny Diaz and
Kendall Coffey, were out on the back porch
negotiating with the Justice Department on the
time, place and manner of reuniting Elian and
the entire Gonzalez clan with the father Juan
Miguel. Armando Gutierrez, the family
spokesman, was shuttling back and forth
between the porch and the adjacent dining room
to brief family members -- not all of whom can
speak English -- on how the negotiations were
going. Elian was asleep in his bed in the room
he shared with his cousin Marisleysis.
Dalrymple chatted with some family members
and friends in the living room for about a half
hour, then went outside to join what amounted
to the perpetual prayer vigil beyond the
barricades. At that hour, he says, there were
about 1,000 to 1,500 people on the scene.
Between prayers, the rumor running through
the crowd was that plans were being made for
the family to be reunited somewhere near
Washington, D.C.
At 4:30 a.m., he returned to the house, entering
through the back door into the dining room. The
immediate family members were in the room
huddled around the lawyers -- who were still on
the phones negotiating with Washington. So
Dalrymple headed through the kitchen and into
the darkened front area of the home. Elian --
who had slept for about eight hours before
being awakened by all the activity inside and
outside the house -- was now lying on a sofa at
the back wall of the living room, the wall
nearest the kitchen and dining room. Another
family member or friend was sleeping on the
sofa along the wall to the right. So Dalrymple
went to a third sofa, which was up against the
front wall of the house, immediately beside the
front door. Soon Lazaro came in from the
kitchen, laid down on the couch with Elian, and
began speaking with him in Spanish. After
awhile, Lazaro got back up and returned to the
kitchen.
"The next thing, I was in a dead sleep," said
Dalrymple. About half an hour later, he woke
again when he heard noises outside the house.
"I heard the rustling of what I call the foot
soldiers," he said. "Then you heard screaming
and yelling like bloody murder and people
screaming, 'Get down, get down, we'll shoot.'
"I jumped up when I heard those words and
said, 'Oh, my God.' Now, Elian was right in
front of me and he was screaming. My natural
instinct was to run to him and sweep him up in
my arms, and I said to myself, 'My God, where
do we go?'
"In front of me, I just heard people screaming,"
he said. "I saw Marisleysis. I saw Lazaro. They
were all trying to run for Elian, and then Elian
was in my arms.
"I ran into the bedroom. They were coming in
from the back and they were coming in from the
front.
"The photographer made his way into the house
with the agents. Then one of the guys from the
family took him by the back and just threw him
into the room where we were, and then, boom,
the door slammed.
"You were waiting to hear boom, boom, boom,
shots," said Dalrymple.
Four others had made it into the closed
bedroom with Dalrymple and Elian: Lazaro's
wife Angela, her niece, the niece's young son,
and Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz.
As Dalrymple, holding the now-terrified Elian,
tried to wedge himself into a cramped closet,
the niece and her son scrambled around to the
right side of the bed and Angela stood her
ground to the right of the closed door.
Photographer Diaz wedged himself up against
the back wall of the room in the narrow space
between the left side of the bed and the closet.
"I was trying to get into the closet as much as I
could, but there was no way to go," said
Dalrymple. "So I asked [Diaz], is there a way out
of here? Can we do something? And he said,
'Donato, just relax, there's no way out. This is it,
man.'"
Beyond the closed door there was a minute of
chaos.
"You heard everything being trashed. People
screaming. And the sound of shoosh, shoosh.
There was pepper spray in the house." Then the
federal agents were at the bedroom door.
"I heard bam, one, then, bam, two," said
Dalrymple. "They were hitting the door with a
battering ram. The door broke right in half and
came down, and these guys rustled into the
room. And the guy who had the gun just like
that [gesturing to his chest] says, 'Don't move,
don't move. Give me the kid. Give me the kid.'
"The next guy had his gun on the other kid.
"I said, 'Don't hurt the boy, don't hurt the boy.'
Then there was this lady with like a towel or a
blanket or a pillow case or something who came
in," said Dalrymple. "Elian -- you've seen the
face on him -- was screaming.
"The soldier and the lady snatched the boy and
they threw the blanket over him," says
Dalrymple. "And then we're going out. And
maybe it was stupid or not, but I followed as the
guy was backing out of the room with the gun
on me."
Did that lady say anything when she grabbed
Elian? "She never said a word that I know of,"
said Dalrymple. "She was like the silent devil
standing there."
The soldier was yelling at him and Elian in
English, not Spanish, he said.
"We are actually in the hallway now," said
Dalrymple, "and he's backing out and he's still
got the gun on me and he's backing out slowly,
with the women behind him, surrounded by
three or four armed guys. And they went down
the stairs outside, and they fell down, hit the
bushes, dropped the kid, picked him up, and
ran toward the fence that was already knocked
down, and made their way to the vehicle, and
I'm following them all the way, pleading with
them."
But was there no knock on the door?
"There was no knocking," said Dalrymple, who
was right by the door. "I would have answered
it."
"If you walked into that house, it was a living
shrine. Well-wishers had come with more
Mother Marys and Sacred Heart of Jesus
pictures. ... It was like a church in there," he
said. "They trashed the house."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/20000501_xex_donato_they_.shtml
Bard
We are a Nation of the Rule of Law;
however, I, for one, will not be Ruled by the Lawless.
To All Elected Officials:
"Stop stealing my earnings that you use to give to those whom you know will vote for
you."
There's not a dime bit of difference between a DemoRat and a RepubRat,
they're simply two wings of the same bird of prey which pecks at your
earnings while insidiously devouring your Freedom.
BUCHANAN-Reform
http://gopatgo2000.com/default.htm
Eternal Vigilance - The Price of Freedom!
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