Betsy Yagla Photo

Noraima Avila says her family and a neighbor’s family are being retaliated against by police.

Shut the fuck up! Nobody move!," yelled members of the New Haven Police Department's new narcotics squad as they jumped out of two vans.

Battering rams in hand, the cops ran toward two nearby homes and busted through the unlocked doors.

According to witnesses, Noraima Avila was sitting outside with neighbors on the evening of June 13 as the cops barreled towards her home. "That's my house," she cried just before they busted through her front door, breaking the lock and leaving a big dent in the door.

Noraima's husband Miguel was in the front room watching TV when the cops busted in. They handcuffed him and asked for his son Jonathan. Jonathan, he told them, was in jail where he's been the last 13 months for violating probation.

Three doors down, at the same time, the narcotics cops used a battering ram to bust through the unlocked door of Veronica Morrison's home. Her 18-year-old son Maurice was home. Cops asked Maurice where his older brother Lamar was.

There were no drugs or paraphernalia found. Police say it was a routine search. The families call it retaliation: Jonathan and Lamar both claim to have been beaten up by officer Dennis O'Connell in early 2008. (According to the police report, the boys were inciting a riot.) Photos from the time show their faces swollen, bruised and cut. Afterwards, they filed complaints and a lawsuit and went to the press with their story.

The families say they've been harassed ever since. Noraima says that when the cops entered her home in June one officer called O'Connell, who stopped by. "He laughed at us," she says.

Police spokesman Joe Avery scoffs at the accusation. "Of course it isn't retaliation," he says.

Just before the narcotics squad left, Noraima says one officer told her, "We're gonna get you sooner or later." She's now terrified of the police.

During the June search the cops tore through the two homes. Kitchen cabinets were emptied at the Avila home; their youngest son's mattress was flung across the room, he says. At the Morrison home, a foot-shaped hole was put through an unlocked upstairs bedroom door. Another hole was kicked in a different bedroom wall. Veronica Morrison says paycheck stubs and $2,000 are missing from son Lamar's room.

At the time Lamar didn't have a bank account — he's since opened one.

The families say they were never shown search warrants. And Morrison was never given a receipt for property taken from her house, she says.

Lamar was later arrested for selling drugs. Lamar's arrest warrant says Lamar sold drugs to an undercover cop twice — something he denies doing. Lamar's arrest warrant makes no mention of the search or the $2,000.

"If it isn't just grabbing cash then I think the police need to come up with another explanation as to why there's no paperwork on this," says the families' attorney, Paul Garlinghouse.

The families' complaints are reminiscent of complaints about New Haven's old narcotics squad: In 2007, then-Lt. Billy White and Det. Justen Kasperzyk were arrested in an FBI investigation into the New Haven police department for stealing money from crime scenes and during police raids. A third cop was later arrested for accepting stolen money.

In a police department shake-up, the city dismantled the narcotics squad and brought in outside consultants to look at police policies. The new narcotics squad was trained by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and launched this spring.

But attorney Garlinghouse says it doesn't seem as though things have improved.

Lt. John Velleca, who heads the new narcotics squad, remembers entering the home with battering rams. "We had to — nobody was home," he says.

He says cops aren't required to show a search warrant before entering a home, and says its not at all strange that the arrest warrant makes no mention of the search: "We didn't find anything there," he says.

And the reason there's no inventory of seized property? "I don't think we took anything. Believe me, if we found something, we'd take it."

But Veronica Morrison insists $2,000 is missing from her son's bedroom. And she says the money was savings from Lamar's jobs at BJ's and Target — not drugs. "He was saving to buy a car," she says.