Saturday, June 9, 2001 2:07 a.m. EDT.
NewsMax.com
With Friday's decision by a federal judge that the Miami family of Cuban
boat boy Elian Gonzalez can sue Clinton administration officials for using
excessive force in the April 22, 2000, raid that resulted in the boy's return to
Cuba, the accounts of Tony Zumbado and Gustavo Moeller may become critical.
Zumbado and Moeller were two-thirds of an NBC camera crew assigned to
provide network pool coverage live inside the Gonzalez home.
As heavily armed federal agents pulled their three-car caravan in front of
the house, Zumbado and Moeller rushed to take up positions inside.
But the gun-toting raiders intercepted them as they entered the front door.
Both men were slugged, pushed to the ground and held at gunpoint with machine
guns - keeping them out of commission for the duration of the raid.
The assaults enabled the government's SWAT team to rampage through the
Gonzalez home unencumbered by any worries of what a video record might show.
Three days later, the third member of the NBC team, Kerry Sanders, revealed
to NewsMax.com exclusively that the episode had put cameraman Zumbado in the
hospital.
Now that a federal judge has called into question government denials of
unneccessary roughness, Sanders' devastating account of that morning's events
may be a harbinger of testimony to come.
"I just got off the phone with Tony. Now he can't move really all that
well," Sanders told NewsMax.com back then, before detailing the events that
led up the assaults.
"Tony and Gustavo had parked themselves for five months now at the
corner of the house just outside the house. The family had said all along that
they would invite cameras into the house to document what happened. As this is
all going down, one of our cameramen by the name of Roger Prehoda was coming in
at around 5 o'clock.
"He was a little bit late that morning. And so he's walking down the
street and he sees the vans coming. And he's thinking, 'Oh my God, this is it.'
"So he grabs his two-way radio and he says, 'It's going down, it's
going down.' That gets transmitted to Gustavo and Tony before the vans even come
down the street. So they jump the fence, get into the yard and they race to the
door. It's a race to beat the agents bacause he knows they're going to be there
any second."
Unknown to the NBC camera crew, INS agents had already entered the house by
the back door, Sanders said, and were inside when Zumbado opened the front door.
"As Tony makes it to the door, somebody inside the house grabs him and
pulls him in and slams the door. Gustavo doesn't make it in. Gustavo's outside.
He said one of the agents takes the butt of his gun and bangs it right into his
forehead, causing him to fall down. I saw the blood on his forehead.
"Tony is in the house but the plan all along had been that the camera
was a pool camera and it was a live pool camera. So he's got cables that are
dangling off the back of his camera that are now going into the house, slammed
in the door. This is television equipment, this isn't your little home video
camera.
"As the door reopens, which is only a matter of seconds, somebody is
grabbing the cables, yanking them back. Tony's got the camera on his shoulder.
They yank it back and pull it down. One of the cables gets pulled out of the
camera, which is the audio cable. The video cable hangs on to the camera but it
sends Tony falling backwards.
"At that point, somebody smacks him in the stomach. Tony is hit in the
stomach and goes down. And then the agent puts his foot on Tony's back and puts
a gun to him and says, 'Don't move or I'll shoot.'
"So, the camera is out of commission. Tony is now down and out of
commission. Tony tells me that as he looks up around, he sees the family there
and he sees these little red dots on Lazaro's forehead, on Marisleysis's
forehead. Which of course are the laser sights from the machine guns. He sees
them all trained there and then he hears what's going on in the back room. But
he's not in that back bedroom because he's now down on the floor with a foot in
his back and a gun to his head saying, 'Don't move.'
Sanders said that Zumbado has family members with law enforcement background
and has actually undergone police SWAT training himself. As a former cameraman
for the Fox TV show "Cops," Zumbado had filmed hundreds of police
raids prior to the Clinton administration's Saturday attack.
In fact, said the reporter, NBC selected Zumbado for the key job of
videotaping Elian's abduction because of his filmwork on "Cops." "He
knows exactly what these people are supposed to do when they go in because he's
trained to do it."
The attack on Elian's home, however, was different, Zumbado admitted to
Sanders.
"'Kerry,' he told me, 'it's amazing how humbling it is. You think you
know how it goes down. I've been through the door with cops plenty of times on
raids. I know what it is. But it's such a different feeling when you're on the
receiving end.'"
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