Cabarrus Cheap Seats

It’s an accomplishment to be featured in Creative Loafing - second in circulation in Charlotte’s collection of left-leaning publications - with the Observer being first; and on the most-listened-to right-leaning radio station in Charlotte - 1110 WBT. Tara Servatius does it with ease. 

How does she pull this off?  By being smarter than most of her older counterparts at both gigs.  She demonstrates this in a recent article on how a man who survived the Nazis and life in the Soviet Union was brought down by Charlotte SWAT, and what a Cabarrus County Representative is going to do about it.

When Tara Servatius sets up the story, it sounds like one of those personal stories from State Of The Union where the fella stands up from his seat right next to the First Lady.  Alexander “Sasha” Ehrenburg spent his boyhood in Latvia under the Nazis, grew up in the Soviet Union, and learned English so that he could hear Radio Free America broadcasts and read books that could get him killed. He also studied engineering and came to work in an American nuclear power plant where he’s universally admired among his peers - a laudable and inspring tale.

But Ehrenburg’s life took a much more tragic twist.  Here’s part of the article.

But on May 10, 2005, the police did come for Ehrenburg. They weren’t communists, but Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police SWAT officers. And they killed the 67-year-old, wheelchair-bound double-amputee with two shots to his body. 

Medics and law enforcement went to Ehrenburg’s home that evening not to arrest him, but merely to check on him after a doctor called 911 because he believed Ehrenburg might be having medical problems. Three and a half hours later, Ehrenburg was dead. Though Ehrenburg repeatedly declined their help and asked to be left alone, they knocked down his door twice, and both times officers say he pointed a gun at them. The second time, SWAT killed him.

In the process, it appears police may have violated their own standards for entry — what few standards they have — and those policies, experts say, are generally used by SWAT teams across the nation. Worse yet, two versions of what happened that night appear to conflict with one another.

Two years later, friends, family and the doctor who called 911 remain baffled by what happened that evening.

“We were pretty dumbfounded that it had happened,” says Dr. David DiLoreto, the doctor who called 911 that night. “We never got a good answer.”

In the days after his death, Ehrenburg’s wife, Izabella Skorska, was careful not to point an accusing finger at police. Skorska and her husband had been donors to the Police Benevolent Association, and in statements sent to local news outlets, Skorska repeatedly insisted that she supported the police but hoped to get answers soon.

Former Police spokesperson Keith Bridges fired back the day after the shooting, describing Ehrenburg to reporters as a “barricaded gunman” and suggesting that he might have been trying to commit “suicide by cop.”

Since then, Ehrenburg’s loved ones say that both the police department and the Mecklenburg County prosecutor’s office have clammed up and withheld information about the case that could legally have been given to them. Their requests that the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation be brought in to oversee an investigation into the incident, which is standard practice in the state’s other large cities, were ignored.

“If my husband did something very wrong, I would have to accept it,” Skorska says.

Instead, a jumble of state and local laws, codes and statutes and the stubbornness of the police department has prevented the family from finding out many of the details about what happened that night.

That set of laws, which Barnhart is working to change in the state legislature, is creating a deadly situation, he says. According to Barnhart, police and SWAT teams can ram down your door and kill you with virtually no public oversight because the public is entitled to very little information about what goes on in these incidents.

[CLICK HERE TO READ THE REMAINDER OF THIS MUST-READ ARTICLE]

Here’s what’s great about this Tara Servatius’ column -  it’s not that it’s so captivating and well-written that you’ll be riveted to it from beginning to end, it’s not that it’s obvious that she’s one of the few people in print media that obviously does her homework and a remarkable amount of research, it’s that she takes that and writes an article that can disgust, inspire, and inform you.  It paints a vivid picture of a shocking situation; but doesn’t leave you hopeless.  You realize that even though the CMPD may have committed an atrocity there are public officials like Jeff Barnhart who are working to fix the issue and smart people like Tara Servatius dedicated to getting the truth out.  There are real problems in the world - and some in our backyard; but you can’t help but feel a little hopeful that there are capable people who are enough to do something about it.

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