SPRING VALLEY — David McKay and his wife, 13-year-old daughter, brother-in-law and two dogs were sleeping early Thursday morning when they heard banging on their front door.
Thinking a neighbor needed help, McKay and his wife, Jamie, ran down the stairs of their townhouse at 36 Sharon Drive and opened the door.
No one in the family was prepared for what they said happened next.
McKay said his family was terrorized by police who were slow to realize they were targeting the wrong house.
Authorities admit that they were at the McKays' home as part of a series of drug raids in Spring Valley, Mount Vernon, the Bronx, northern New Jersey, the Albany area and Pennsylvania. But they dispute the family's account, insisting they were briefly in the McKays' home looking for information.
The family said that at least eight police officers — their weapons drawn — barged into the house and pointed guns at the family and threaten ed to shoot their dogs.
"Their guns were drawn. They were screaming, 'Where's Michael? Where's Michael?' " McKay recounted hours later. "I'm trying to tell them there's no one named Michael here."
McKay said he tried to explain that his daughter was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom, but the officers ran up the stairs anyway.
He said they pulled the eighth-grader out of her bed at gunpoint and dragged her down the stairs.
"I was so scared I thought I was going to have a heart attack," Destinee McKay, a middle school student, said.
A two-alarm fire broke out this morning at a medical marijuana collective in San Jose, according to the San Jose Fire Department.
The blaze broke out in a single-story Victorian style house located on Drake Street, according to fire Capt. Debbie Ward. The home is the location of the collective Herb Appeal, located near Auzerais and Bird avenues.
The collective has a Facebook page and describes itself as a "compassionate medical cannabis collective, striving to provide top quality medicine to our doctor recommended patients."
The fire was first reported at 3:04 a.m., according to the fire department. Ward said the damage was confined to the attic and front porch and that the building should be salvageable.
Firefighters called for a second alarm at 3:23 a.m. and had the blaze under control at 5:04 a.m.
Ward estimated the damage at $250,000. There were no injuries associated to the fire.
The first firefighters to arrive found a downed power line, but Ward couldn't say if that's what triggered the fire. Ward thinks the line was brought down by heat and flames generated by the fire.
The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.
"Kurt Cannabis Meets Connie Cancer", is a special bonus on the DVD of "What if Cannabis Cured Cancer", directed by master puppeteer Steven Ritz-Barr. It's an outrageous bit of puppet theater, imagining a comical meeting somewhere in the liver between the mean, bitchy diva "Connie Cancer" (Roseanne Barr), and the cool, hip and rather wise Kurt Cannabis (Malcolm McDowell).
SPRING VALLEY — David McKay and his wife, 13-year-old daughter, brother-in-law and two dogs were sleeping early Thursday morning when they heard banging on their front door.
