RENO –– As a landlord, Lisa Fleiner wonders what more she could have done.  On the morning of May 19, 2008, smoke and flash bang grenades poured into her Reno rental property. 

“The neighbors were calling, they said there was smoke everywhere, panic,” Fleiner said. 

Her former home, the home where she first brought her children after they were born, was the subject of a Drug Enforcement Agency raid. 

In a court case that met its end March 3, Michael and Lisa Fleiner claimed that the Sparks SWAT team, acting under orders from the DEA, used excessive force in its hunt for Ismael Infante-Ramirez, Fleiner’s tenant and, unknown to the Fleiners, a methamphetamine trafficker. 

Shattered glass from shot-out windows littered the carpet, wooden door frames were splintered where locks used to be and an outdoor gate lay dismembered from its hinges.  In all, the Fleiners paid more than $30,000 to repair the damage without help from any agency.  The landlords’ court case asked that the DEA and the city of Sparks be made to pay for the damage.

The U.S. District Court for Nevada dismissed the Fleiners’ suit, claiming that the SWAT team was in danger and was justified in whatever damage was done to the house.

“The safety risks involved to the officers in executing this type of warrant were extreme,” the ruling stated, adding that “due to the inherently dangerous nature of the execution of that type of warrant” the Sparks SWAT team acted reasonably and did not violate the Fleiners’ constitutional rights.  Representatives from the DEA did not return phone calls for comment Monday.

According to Sparks City Attorney, Chet Adams, federal courts take excessive force lawsuits on a case-by-case basis.

“In excessive force cases, the courts look at number of factors,” Adams said. “They have them categorized and they take all those things into consideration before arriving at a decision.”

In justifying the level of threat, Adams claimed the DEA had good reason to inflict the damage.

“The DEA had quite a background on this house,” Adams said. “They had been collecting information for a long time. It’s not like this place was picked at random.”

However, as the landlord reflects on the $30,000 in repairs she has done to the home and the fact that she thought her tenant was an upstanding citizen, Fleiner feels differently.

“They don’t have ‘drug dealer’ tattooed on their foreheads,” Fleiner said. 

The landlord added that before renting the house to Infante-Ramirez in 2002, she ran a background check through the National Tenant Network.  It came back clean without even a parking ticket. Records given to her by the courts confirmed that Infante-Ramirez did not have a criminal history.  Fleiner also added that the man paid the rent on time and in person every month for six years.

“I had maintenance people over there who never saw anything suspicious,” she said. “The neighbors were my friends and would have called me. … Aside from tapping his cell phone and following him around … what more could I have done?”

Tapping phone records and following the man around was exactly how the DEA caught Infante-Ramirez, according to court records.

According to reports, the DEA had been listening in on phone conversations as local dealers set up drug deals.  Court documents state that Infante-Ramirez was implicated after he unknowingly took a bugged cell phone from another drug dealer.

Fleiner still claims that her former home was not a clearinghouse for methamphetamine and that the search was conducted in an “unreasonably excessive” manner.

“They made primary entry, why did they need to make secondary entry? … Why did they need to break all the windows around the whole house? He (Infante-Ramirez) was outside watering the grass and the garage was open. ... They could have done it differently.”

The final judgment to dismiss Fleiner’s complaint states, “A court must balance the amount of force applied against the need for that force.”  The federal court found the balance to tip in the DEA’s favor.

The raid was part of a DEA sweep that took 10 men to jail, including Infante-Ramirez, and cleared the Truckee Meadows of a drug operation.

“I am pleased that the court recognized the extreme danger to police officers posed by these drug dealers,” Sparks city attorney Chet Adams said in a press release. “I encourage all landlords in Sparks to protect their rental properties by not allowing this type of large-scale drug activity.”

According to the DEA Web site, the agency in Nevada made the following drug seizures in 2008 at six methamphetamine labs: 

Cocaine: 24.6 kgs. 

Heroin: 3.4 kgs. 

Methamphetamine: 44.1 kgs. 

Marijuana: 167.8 kgs. 

The site further states that methamphetamine, specifically crystal methamphetamine produced in Mexico and imported into the state, has become the principal drug of concern in Nevada.

“In addition, cocaine, particularly crack cocaine, is a significant problem in the urban areas of the state,” according to the fact sheet.  “Due to its close proximity to California and its porous border, Nevada often serves as a transshipment point for various drugs to the central and eastern sections of the United States. There has also been a significant increase in deaths attributed to diverted pharmaceuticals.  2006 had a total of 107 deaths, while just the second half of 2008 had 169 deaths.