More lies from Officer Bryan Yant, Las Vegas’s finest (posted 19 July 2010 ∙ 12:42 pm)


Officer Bryan Yant,
Liar and Killer

In four transactions over five weeks, an undercover detective bought $840 in marijuana from Trevon Cole, according to a search warrant affidavit unsealed Friday.

Those drug deals — which totaled 1.8 ounces of marijuana — led to a late-night police raid on Cole’s East Bonanza Road apartment June 11, where the 21-year-old was shot and killed by Las Vegas police detective Bryan Yant.

According to the affidavit, which was unsealed after an attorney for Cole’s family filed a court motion, an undercover detective first made contact with a suspect known as “Big,” later identified as Cole, on April 28.

Cole and the detective met in the area of Desert Inn and Fort Apache roads, where 4.1 grams of marijuana changed hands for $60.

The affidavit said the detective and Cole met again on May 19 near Cole’s apartment complex, where the detective bought 21.5 grams of marijuana, paying Cole $380.

The detective again contacted Cole on May 26 and June 3, looking to buy almost $400 in marijuana. Cole did not have enough marijuana in May and said he needed to contact his supplier, the affidavit said.

In June, Cole sold $400 worth of marijuana — 27.2 grams — to the detective.

In the affidavit, Yant wrote that police considered it likely that the raid would turn up more drugs, scales, bags and elaborate records such as “owe” sheets related to narcotic sales.

Yant also wrote that Cole had a lengthy criminal history for drug trafficking in both Houston and Los Angeles, and would have firearms to protect his drugs and money. A night raid would be preferable, Yant wrote, to ensure the safety of children and other residents in the complex. [! —ed.]

Except.

There was no criminal history. That was a lie.

Andre Lagomarsino, the attorney representing Cole’s fiancee and family, said there were several errors in the affidavit — that Cole had no criminal history

There was no undercover buy on May 19 — at least, not from Trevon Cole. He wasn’t even in the state. That was a lie, too.

[Cole] was actually out of state on May 19, when police claimed to have bought marijuana from him.

The family told the attorney that Cole was in Los Angeles for his fiancee’s baby shower. Family picked him up at an L.A. bus station on May 14, and the couple returned to Las Vegas on May 20, he said.

There were no owe sheets. And there were no weapons.

According to the search warrant return, officers seized an undisclosed amount of marijuana, digital scales and $702 in cash, but found no transaction records or weapons.

So with this pack of lies in hand, in the interest of the safety of children and other residents, Officer Bryan Yant led a team of camouflaged, masked men to storm Trevon Cole and Sequioa Pearce’s apartment. They smashed in the windows, broke down the door, and came rushing into the apartment in the dead of night, heavily armed and screaming for immediate surrender. They surrounded Trevon Cole in his own bathroom, and, while he was getting down and raising his hands above his head, shot him in the face with an AR-15 assault rifle for a furtive motion that nobody but the Gangsters in Blue ever saw.

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13 replies to More lies from Officer Bryan Yant, Las Vegas’s finest | Use a feed to Follow replies to this article | TrackBack URI

  1. Discussed in Tweets that mention Marijuana Kills -- er, sorry, *Selling Marijuana to Consenting Adults* Kills -- -- Topsy.com

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bert C and radgeek, Charles Davis. Charles Davis said: Marijuana Kills — er, sorry, Selling Marijuana to Consenting Adults Kills — http://bit.ly/aHjjLG […]

  2. George Donnelly

    Maybe he needs to be tried in absentia by a free market justice panel.

  3. Me

    There is no such thing as an AR15 assault rifle. The M16 is an assault rifle. The AR15 is the civilian, semi-automatic version of the M16 and is capable of neither burst nor automatic fire.

    • Rad Geek

      Me,

      I’m aware of the distinction between semiautomatic and fully automatic rifles.

      However, ArmaLite Model 15 is actually a model number that includes both the civilian semiautomatic and the selective fire derivatives, including the M16. The AR-15 was originally designed in the late 1950s, and selective fire models existed as the AR-15 well before the U.S. government adopted it in the early 1960s; besides military use, fully auto AR-15’s are available for sale to law enforcement, and police departments buy up both semiautomatic and fully automatic weapons for their SWAT teams and other paramilitary operations. If you go to a gun dealer looking for an AR-15 what will be available are the semiautomatic-only, so-called civilian models, so there is some common confusion now that AR-15 just means semiautomatic-only version of the M16. Now, the news story that I linked does not say whether Officer Bryan Yant’s AR-15 was semiautomatic or fully automatic (the former is more likely; police departments do buy both, but my impression is that they mostly buy semiautomatics).

      In any case, all of the gun jargon to one side, it’s common for gun geeks to insist that assault rifle means something like a selective fire rifle that uses a detachable magazine or something along those lines. I’m aware of the narrower technical usage; I just don’t care. Real-world usage of the term is a lot broader than that; lots of words have narrower and broader senses. Used to be that some people would get real pissed off if you called your pistol or rifle a gun, because a gun supposedly meant artillery on ships or land; what you had in your hand, soldier, was a firearm. Other people would get real pissed off if you called your pistol or rifle a gun, because a gun supposedly meant a shotgun and nothing else; what you had in your hand, son, was a pistol or a rifle. The fact that these two different narrow technical usageswere contradictory didn’t stop anyone from acting as if it was a deliverance from God Himself and an obvious sign of ignorance if you spoke any other way. Nobody much worries about it now, but because of the political idiocy over gun control legislation in the 1990s, and the so-called assault weapons ban, people have taken to nitpicking about assault rifle instead.)

      Anyway, in this particular case, political abuses of language to one side, there are still good reasons for a broader term to refer to intermediate combat rifles like the semiautomatic-only AR-15, as well as their selective-fire counterparts, without dicking around with a long jargony definition. If you’ve got a suggestion for a better term than assault rifles, which is widely used and understood in both its narrower and its broader senses, then feel free to suggest it. But, just for reference, I didn’t choose the word out of ignorance of how the firearms in question work.

  4. Me

    You could just say “rifle.” Black paint and plastic don’t make it special.

    • Rad Geek

      Of course you could do that; you could call it a lot of things. But there are a lot of different kind of rifles out there for a lot of different purposes — hunting, sniping, combat, etc. Yant’s crew doesn’t generally roll up on apartments in Las Vegas hoisting Winchester bolt-actions over their shoulders

      If you wanted to, you could also call the gun he used to shoot Trevon Cole in the face just an AR-15 tout court, with no further explanation for those who don’t know what an AR-15 is; or you could call it a gun or maybe you could call it a big gun if you wanted to be precise. But the question is what set of terms will give the best understanding of what kind of tactical operations this masked gang of narcs is planning on getting themselves into when they roll out to serve a warrant on someone who allegedly might possibly have been a small-time neighborhood pot dealer. The fact that they are carrying semiautomatic rifles designed for combat, when they roll out for this kind of thing, is significant. More significant than what just saying a rifle will tell you.

  5. Yant Collateral VICTIM

    Does anyone know Yant’s total LE career body count?…..how many people has he shot?….how many has he killed?…how many lies has he told? I’d really like to know all about this FUCKING COWBOY and his fellow LVPD THUGS and MURDERERS.

    • Rad Geek

      Yant’s record indicates that he’s shot three people, including Trevon Cole. One of his previous victims died; the other survived.

  6. Dr. Q

    Jesus fucking christ. As soon as this guy gets cleared for the shooting by his fellow gang-members, he’s put under another investigation for more lies: http://www.lvrj.com/news/officer-under-suspicion-101541563.html

    Oh, and now the Las Vegas PD is only doing drug raids with a SWAT team. For the safety of the public, of course.

    • Rad Geek

      Thanks for the heads-up; I hadn’t seen the story in the paper yet. Of course, this four-time winner is still a fully-paid member of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, currently being given an extended tax-funded vacation from his government job. I mentioned the latest in my Police Beat round-up earlier today.

      Gillespie and the Clark Regime’s prosecutors have been trying to spin the whole shooting-an-unarmed-innocent-man-in-the-head thing as if it were a matter of sloppiness on Yant’s part, which I think is the reasoning behind sending in the SWAT teams. E.g., it took Yant a couple of seconds to bash in the door to the apartment, instead of breaking through immediately on the first ram! Sloppy! Send in the professionals instead to handle hyperviolent, overwhelming paramilitary raids instead of part-timers like Yant!

  7. Discussed in Rad Geek People’s Daily 2010-08-28 – The Police Beat

    […] example, consider local hero Officer Bryan Yant, liar and killer for the Las Vegas Metro police department, who by making up lies to obtain fraudulent search […]

  8. Discussed in ‘Showtime Syndrome’ Strikes Las Vegas « Eclectic Thoughts

    […] More lies from Officer Bryan Yant, Las Vegas’s finest (radgeek.com) […]

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