It took Carlos Pena decades to build his local business after immigrating to North Hollywood, California, from El Salvador. It only took a few hours to destroy it.
While Pena is the one who created NoHo Printing & Graphics, where he fashioned commercial signs and banners, T-shirts, headshots, and other products, he is not the one who did the damage, despite the fact that he has been left with the bill and without a livelihood.
In early August of last year, after a fugitive violently thrust Pena from his shop and barricaded himself inside, a SWAT team from the City of Los Angeles fired more than 30 rounds of tear gas canisters over the course of 13 hours. When the government entered the building, the officers found their target had escaped. Left inside was a shop that was a shell of itself, with Pena’s inventory ruined and the bulk of his equipment unusable.
Pena didn’t fault the city for attempting to subdue an allegedly dangerous person. But he objected to what came next: The government refused his requests for compensation, strapping him with expenses that exceed $60,000 and a situation that has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, as he has been resigned to working at a much-reduced capacity out of his garage, according to a lawsuit he filed this month in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
“Apprehending a dangerous fugitive is in the public interest,” the suit notes. “The cost of apprehending such fugitives should be borne by the public, and not by an unlucky and entirely innocent property owner.”
Pena is not the first such property owner to see his life destroyed and be left picking up the pieces. Insurance policies often have disclaimers that they do not cover damage caused by the government. But governments sometimes refuse to pay for such repairs, buttressed by jurisprudence from various federal courts which have ruled that actions taken under “police powers” are not subject to the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
That’s what happened to the Lech family in Greenwood Village, Colorado, after cops destroyed their residence while in pursuit of a suspected shoplifter, unrelated to the family, who forced himself inside their house. The $580,000 home was rendered unlivable and had to be demolished; the government gave them a cool $5,000.
Hellbound and Down 