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Detroit native Charlie LeDuff for Mother Jones on the killing of 7 year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones and the decline of Detroit.

But the SWAT team didn’t wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death.

Police first floated [9] the story that Aiyana’s grandmother had grabbed Weekley’s gun. Then, realizing that sounded implausible, they said she’d brushed the gun as she ran past the door. But the grandmother says she was lying on the far side of the couch, away from the door. 

Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the police threw the grenade into the wrong apartment. The suspect fingered for Blake’s murder, Chauncey Owens, lived in the upstairs flat, with Charles Jones’ sister.

Plus, grenades are rarely used when rounding up suspects, even murder suspects. But it was dark. And TV may have needed some pyrotechnics.

“I’m worried they went Hollywood,” said a high-ranking Detroit police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation and simmering resentment in the streets. “It is not protocol. And I’ve got to say in all my years in the department, I’ve never used a flash-bang in a case like this.”

The official went on to say that the SWAT team was not briefed about the presence of children in the house, although the neighborhood informant who led homicide detectives to the Lillibridge address told them that children lived there. There were even toys [10] on the lawn.

A dollhouse sits in an empty lot not far from where Aiyana was shot by the police officers storming her home.

“It was a total fuck-up,” the official said. “A total, unfortunate fuck-up.”

Owens, a habitual criminal [11], was arrested upstairs minutes after Aiyana’s shooting and charged for the slaying of Je’Rean. His motive, authorities say, was that the teen failed to pay him the proper respect. Jones, too, later became a person of interest [12] in Je’Rean’s murder—he allegedly went along for the ride—but Jones denies it, and he’s lawyered up and moved to the suburbs.

As Officer Weekley wept on the sidewalk, Aiyana was rushed to the trauma table, where she was pronounced dead. Her body was transferred to the Wayne County morgue.

Dr. Carl Schmidt is the chief medical examiner there. There are at least 50 corpses on hold in his morgue cooler, some unidentified, others whose next of kin are too poor to bury them. So Dr. Schmidt keeps them on layaway, zipped up in body bags as family members wait [13] for a ship to come in that never seems to arrive.

The day I visited, a Hollywood starlet [14] (PDF) was tailing the doctor, studying for her role as the medical examiner in ABC’s new Detroit-based murder drama Detroit 1-8-7. The title is derived from the California penal code for murder: 187 [15]. In Michigan, the designation for homicide is actually 750.316 [16] (PDF), but that’s just a mouthful of detail.

“You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suffered,” Schmidt told me.

“What disease was that?” I asked.

“The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit,” he said. “Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic.”