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Bets And Bullets: A Small-Time Gambler's Death By SWAT
Bets And Bullets: A Small-Time Gambler's Death By SWATDave McKenna
Yesterday 6:23pm
It's been nine years since police in Fairfax County, Va. turned small-time bettor Sal Culosi into a bookie and then killed him, but Culosi's death has been forcibly dragged back into the news, and so has all the unaccountable power-drunkenness that led to it. His killers, we've been reminded, struck again.
Culosi's father, Sal Sr., wrote about the killing of his son in an op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post on Christmas Eve. His piece asked for justice for John Geer, another unarmed man killed by the same force that wrecked his family, and whose case has caused a revisiting of the younger Culosi's death. "I hope that the court in the Geer case resists its traditional inclination of favoring the government," the elder Culosi wrote.
In other words, he wants Geer to get more justice than his son ever did.
Culosi was unarmed and standing in his socks in front of his townhouse on Jan. 24, 2006, when a member of the Fairfax police tactical squad, or SWAT team, gunned him down. The shooter, Officer Deval Bullock, had shown up with other cops seconds before to serve a search warrant to look for evidence of football betting just days before Super Bowl XL.