“He’s only a baby. He didn’t deserve any of this,” says Alecia Phoensavanh.

Phoensavanh’s 19-month-old son, Bounkham Phonesavanh, is in the hospital with critical burns after police lobbed a flash grenade into his playpen during a no-knock raid.

Police raided the home in the middle of the night as part of a search for an alleged drug dealer. The suspect was not in the home.

“There was no clothes, there was no toys, there was nothing to indicate that there was children present in the home,” says Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell. “If there had’ve been, then we would’ve done something different.”

The Phoensavanh family disputes this: they say that a booster seat was clearly visible in the car parked outside their home.

A fund has been set up to pay for Bounkham’s medical expenses. Readers should be warned that the linked page contains extremely graphic photos. “His whole face is ripped open,” Phoensavanh has said.



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