Return to Transcripts main page

Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Details of US Soldiers Slain in Suicide Bombing; Florida Police Officer Accused of Terrorist Ties; Further Look at Heroin Addiction; Examining the Sandra Bland Case. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired December 23, 2015 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

VINNY BONACASA, STAFF SGT. LOUIS BONACASA'S BROTHER: A Gentlemen. He loved his family -- he was cut from a different cloth, he was a good man. A man's man, a gentleman, he loved his family, he loves his country, he died doing what he wanted to do. He was a real soldier, a real hero.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[12:30:14] JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Also killed, Sgt. Peter Taub from Pennsylvania. His father says he Skyped with him a few weeks ago, he thought that his son was in Saudi Arabia, he now he knows Taub didn't tell his family he was in Afghanistan, because he did not want them to worry.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOEL TAUB, SGT. PETER TAUB'S FATHER: Real the personality, he was funny, he was thoughtful. He's a really good family man. He loved his wife, and more importantly, he more so loved his daughter.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARROLL: Major Adrianna Vorderbruggen was also killed. She was 36 years old. She was the first openly gay female active duty service member in the U.S. military, and the first openly gay air force officer to die in combat. She fought for years to get the "don't ask, don't tell" policy repeal and later married her partner they have a son Jacob.

Adding to the list of fallen heroes, 28-year-old Sgt. Michael Cinco who was a resident of Mercedes, Texas and also as mentioned earlier returning to the U.S. today, Chester McBride, a former football hero from Georgia, he was described as a quiet young man who was really a class act.

And again I did very briefly speak with Louis Bonacasa's mother yesterday. Our producer Lauren Lee also spoke with her. And what really struck me is the fact that this woman have the courage to speak with so many of us here at CNN in this time of need and this grieving time.

She also wanted to point out a couple things very quickly, she said he was proud of being a soldier, she said he was doing something that he loved, and that's how he died, serving his country. ALISON KOSIK, CNN ANCHOR: And she had the strength to talk to news reporters and your heart just goes out to all those families. You see those pictures and those videos and the fact that one soldier didn't want to tell his family where he was not to worry of him.

CARROLL: While looking at the pictures there again, and again exactly not wanting to tell his family again because he wanted to, you know, make sure that they knew that he was, OK. I mean this is how this men and women are, you know, they think of family, they think of country, all of the time, it's just tragic for all of them.

KOSIK: All right, thanks so much for telling us more about them. And we'll be back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:35:55] KOSIK: The terrorism-linked attacks to Paris and San Bernardino have made many Americans on edge right now, and that had some -- has put some Muslims in the United States under scrutiny.

In South Florida's Broward county local activists have for months pushed the sheriff to fire one of the deputies, that's because he is a Muslim.

The activists believed he has connections to an organization they say supports terror.

They even have a less than complimentary nickname for him, its Deputy Hamas.

Randi Kaye has more now from Fort Lauderdale.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOYCE KAUFMAN, HOST "THE JOYCE KAUFMAN SHOW": What I do want to do is to get my questions answered and when CAIR inserts himself I know that not every Muslims is a Jihadist, but all the Jihadist seem to be Muslims.

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Joyce Kaufman has been on talk radio in South Florida for more than 20 years. A hot topic these days is a man named Nasir Hamzi. He's the regional director of CAIR the Council on American Islamic Relations. He's also a sheriff's deputy of Broward County.

KAUFMAN: Anybody in this country is afraid to have a conversation about Islam.

KAYE: Kaufman says Deputy Hamzi wasn't properly vetted given his connection to CAIR and wants him gone from the police department.

KAUFMAN: I've been called everything from racist to moron to islamaphob, one-trick pony. And, you know, I refuse to bow down.

KAYE: Are you an islamaphob?

KAUFMAN: Not at all.

KAYE: Neither Hamzi nor the sherif would speak with us, but a spokesperson for the Broward County Sherif's Department told me Hamzi has been with the department since 2011, a full-time deputy since 2014.

The department considers him an excellent deputy and loyal American.

Hamzi travels the states speaking out against extremism, and trains Muslims in mosques how to escape an active shooter.

Still, Kaufman wants him investigated, and she's not alone.

Activist David Rosenthal calls deputy Hamzi, "Deputy Hamas".

DAVID ROSENTHAL, ACTIVIST: I hate Islam, Islam is evil.

KAYE: Rosenthal even held a rally protesting Hamzi, but CAIR Florida's lawyer says critics have it all wrong.

WILFREDO RUIZ, CAIR FLORIDA LEGAL COUNSEL: Whenever we're in the electoral year, there's a spike of this Islam phobic rhetoric. When we heard people like Trump, it's definitely hate speech.

KAYE: Kaufman supports Donald Trump's idea to surveil mosques and ban some Muslims.

Do you think you're contributing to the fear when you bring it up on the air?

KAUFMAN: I think the fear is there. I don't think I'll do anything to stoke it. I don't have too, it's there.

KAYE: The fact is and Kaufman knows the numbers only a very small fraction of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims endorsed the violence of terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda still she wonders if Hamzi would take action.

As a sherif's deputy, his job is to uphold the law and it sounds like you're concern that may be he would turn the other way if he heard some radical conversations taking place in a mosque, right. Am I hear you correctly?

KAUFMAN: That is correct, I don't know. I mean I can't say that that's a fact, but I can say it's not a fact.

KAYE: Kaufman wants to know if Hamzi was ever cleared by the FBI the Lawyer for CAIR says he was fully vetted by the FBI.

Randi Kaye, CNN, Fort Lauderdale.

KOSIK: OK, Randi, thanks for that.

Let's switch our gears to weather. Because those of you in the part of the country that probably would see snow around now, because it is winter, well just accept it, be most likely will not have a white Christmas this year.

Minneapolis, you won't get below freezing this week.

Philadelphia, Christmas day, gets this it's going to be almost 70 degrees. Let's go out and play tennis.

Right here in New York City on Christmas Day, 65 degrees. What?

Jennifer Gray is at the CNN weather center in Atlanta, where it's also going to feel like spring this Friday.

Jennifer what's going on with the winter this year?

JENNIFER GRAY, CNN METEOROLOGIST: That's right, everyone is asking, "Where is it? If you're dreaming of a white Christmas, keep on dreaming. We have more of a spring light pattern in place warm and humid air filtering in from the south colliding with this cold and dry air though in the west.

The west is a very different story getting a lot of snow and very cold temperatures. But because of the collision of those two air masses it's making up for a severe weather threat, today in fact tornadoes, some of those strong damaging winds and large hale across the Mississippi River Valley on east into Nashville global even included in that 30 million people, the potential for severe weather risk today.

[12:40:20] So we already have tornado watches in place for portions of Texas all the way up through Illinois. Thunderstorm warnings in effect already and we also have a tornado warning in effect for Southern Illinois.

And so that is going to be in effect for the next couple of moments. You can see that right there for Perry County.

So, where is winter? Well, it is going to stay away for the next couple of days at least the next week or so, but we do have wet weather. We're trading in the snow for the rain this year. And you can see that line of severe storms that will be developing over the course of the afternoon.

So, high temperatures are going to be running 20, 25 degrees above normal for this time of year. Raleigh at 71 today, New York City at 65, D.C at 68, so the departures, Cleveland, you are going to be 27 degrees above normal today, Chicago almost 30 degrees above normal.

This warming trend Alison will last through the Christmas Eve. Christmas day, we do cool down just a little bit. But it is not going to be anywhere near where we should be this time of the year.

KOSIK: Well, you know what? As a Florida girl, I have no complaints trading in snow for rain and these warm temperatures.

Jennifer Gray, thanks so much.

GRAY: Me either. All right. KOSIK: Still ahead, heroin addiction, it's a becoming an epidemic.

So how do we deal with it? Instead of charging users with a crime, a Massachusetts police chief says, he has a better idea. And it is seems to work.

That's coming after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SANJAY GUPTA, CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Emmanuel Hawkins doesn't give up.

NONNIE HAWKINS, EMMANUEL'S GRANDMOTHER: High five, you shut that down, good job. Good job.

GUPTA: His mom, Tara, was 12 weeks pregnant when she was attacked by a teenager she was trying to help. She was in a coma and brain dead. Doctors kept her on life support for 16 weeks until Emmanuel was born, two months early.

HAWKINS: They told me to be prepared to bury him in 24 hours.

GUPTA: He weighed less than 3 pounds. His lungs were underdeveloped, his kidneys, shutdown. Emmanuel had surgeries on his heart and his eyes before he was three weeks old. Two days after giving birth, his mother died leaving him in the care of his grandmother.

HAWKINS: I was told that he would have chronic lung disease all his life. He wouldn't be able to walk. He wouldn't be able to talk. So, I dismissed anything negative, and I worked with Emanuel around the clock. I literally have poured myself in him.

GUPTA: At age 8, he could say 10 words. Now 11-years-old, he can express himself, and tries to prevent the type of violence that killed his mom. With Nonnie's help, he wrote a comic book starring himself as a super hero who fights bullies.

EMMANUEL HAWKINS: My voice is being heard.

GUPTA: The free comic book is going to be turned into the anti- bullying public service announcements.

HAWKINS: Life happens, but you can turn it around for the good.

GUPTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:45:42] UNKOWN FEMALE: In Part II of the CNNs special series entitled "Primary Concern, Heroin". Dr. Sanjay Gupta held a story of a Gloucester, Massachusetts' police chief who refuses to jail addicts.

Instead, he's got a Facebook page where he encourages addicts to trade in their drugs and exchange it for help with detox and recovery.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It is a mystery, why exactly in this tiny fishing community of Gloucester, Massachusetts has heroine addiction become an epidemic. It could be the long and lonely winters. It could be the stigma of addictions and lack of resources for treatment. Whatever the exact cause is unclear. But one thing Gloucester has is pills, lots and lots of pain pills.

CHIEF LEONARD CAMPANELLO, GLOUCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS POLICE: A lot of this addiction came from a very legal and very accepted way to deal with pain, and that's a big problem.

GUPTA: Now, Chief of Police Leonard Campanello tells me, we could leave the station, walk anywhere, up the north shore, and come back with heroine in just 10 minutes.

CAMPANELLO: We're finding it in teenagers, we're finding it all the way up to legislators, judges, police officers, sons, daughters, you know, family members, this has no boundary.

GUPTA: So the chief decided on a radical approach, probably best described as the opposite of a war on drugs. He used Facebook to make an offer to the citizens of Gloucester.

CAMPANELLO: If you're a user of heroine or opiates, let us help you. We know you do not want this addiction. We have resources here in city that can and will make a difference in your life. Do not become a statistic.

GUPTA: We won't arrest you, we will help you. He had no idea that it would work. He had no idea of anyone would listen. He didn't even know if it was legal.

Did you hesitate? I mean, did you have any concerns about this sort of strategy or putting it out there, so boldly?

CAMPANELLO: No, I think the worst thing they could do was to fire me.

GUPTA: Did you talk to your wife about it, or anybody else before hit send?

CAMPANELLO: No, this was, you know, possible that I have validity for everybody of the good things sometimes.

GUPTA: I want to give you an idea of how this remarkable program works. We're here at the Gloucester Police Department, if you're someone who's addicted to heroine, you would walk through these doors over here, and by the way, you'll notice of something's a little different.

First of all, you'd pick up the phone and tell them that you're here because you're a heroine addict. And that would start this whole process, a notion of getting an angel assigned to you. But also, take a look over here. Your needles, they have sharps container over here, there are paraphernalia, your drugs, they go over here. When you start to walk through these doors, now, you're not going into the police station to get arrested, but to get help.

CAMPANELLO: When we first started this program, it was an end of the war on drugs. And as we start thinking about it, was it really ever a war on drugs or was it a war on addiction.

And I think that we made a statement, at least for our Gloucester residents, that seems to have resonated, you know, a lot of different places that we are back to working for people who need help.

So they'll come in here.

GUPTA: And the people are showing up. So far this year, almost 300 people have come through the doors, and are now in treatment. And the patients aren't just from Gloucester, unable to get the help he needed in California, Steven Lesnikoski got on a plane and came knocking on the chief's door.

[12:50:04] STEVEN LESNIKOSKI, RECOVERING HEROIN USER: I showed up here at 3:30 in the morning, and the officers, they treated me with respect and dignity, like I was a normal human being not any kind of stigma that societies attach to the addicts. And I got the help that I needed.

GUPTA: The story that led Steven here was all too familiar. Pills.

Did you break your ankle?

LESNIKOSKI: No, I tore my achilles' heel.

GUPTA: Pretty painful, I Bet?

LESNIKOSKI: Yeah, it was very painful. I could not walk for a couple of weeks. I was not have a cast, but had to prop my leg up. And that kind of persistently got worse. I was prescribed Vicodin painkillers for that.

GUPTA: How long after you first got that prescription for Vicodin, when you hurt your ankle before you're taking heroin now?

LESNIKOSKI: LESNIKOSKI: Eighteen months.

GUPTA: Eighteen months.

LESNIKOSKI: And I'd say give or take a month or two, about 18 months, less than two years.

GUPTA: I want to make a really important point, these are FDA- approved, doctor prescribed pills, this is heroin and they have the same effect on the brain. The most typical course is that someone starts with pills like this, and they get cut off, they turn to heroin, which is an illegal drug but it works fast. It gets you high, and it is very, very cheap. We know that 80 percent of heroin users started out with pills like these.

The question always arises. I think with these sort programs, does it enable people to keep doing heroin?

DAVID ROSENBLOOM, BOSTON UNIVERSITY PROF.HEALTH POLICY AND MANAGEMENT: Yeah.

GUPTA: Because they think, look, I'm not going to be criminalized, I got a safety net, I can keep doing this.

ROSENBLOOM: Nobody wants to keep doing it. They want to get better. They haven't had the help to get better. This is a chronic relapsing condition. People need help lots of times. We have as a society told them that if they relapse, they fail. We send all the wrong messages. So, people don't want to continue to suffer.

GUPTA: The chief knows this because he lives this.

You were a plain clothes narcotics detective for some time. You saw all these all these people. I mean, you still see these people, but you really saw them up close, the people who're addicted to heroin, who're living that life.

CAMPANELLO: We had a mom that was a heroin addict for years. She had a 2-year-old son in her care. We would routinely do search warrants if we knew that she was selling out of the house. And we came in one night and corner was equipped, and I was the 2-year-old walking over just to check if that kid was all right. And he immediately put his arms up, and he grabbed me around the neck, and he would not let go. And he stayed like that for three hours.

And so, here's this guy coming in, you know, back in the day when, you know, armed to the teeth either ready to go, ready to sniff out drugs with the team of law enforcement who spent the night, you know, cradling a child, and that stuck with me for a very long time in terms of, you know, where is that child now, you know? That the atmosphere that they grow up with? Can something be done to stop this next generation? And where do we start?

GUPTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, Gloucester, Massachusetts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KOSIK: Just a fantastic series there, and tune in tonight to AC360 8:00 p.m. to see Part III of Sanjay Gupta's special report on heroin.

Coming up. No indictments in the case of an African-American woman who was found dead in her jail cell after failing to use a turn signal. Sandra Bland's family reacts to the grand jury decision that after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CELIA NEUSTADT, DIRECTOR AND FOUNDER OF THE INNER HARBOR PROJECT: One of the things that I was always struck by growing up in Baltimore was the segregation of the city, and the division, and I was always interested in how we can bring people and communities together.

My name is Celia Neustadt. I'm the Director and Founder of the Inner Harbor Project.

The Inner Harbor Project is Youth Initiative to come up with pollution to violence in Baltimore inner harbor. When we did about two and a half years of research to understand the origin tension between teenagers and police officers and why there is violence.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We tried to get the officers to understand that the youth are also people, that if you give most youth respect, they will return it, but we are not naive to think that there are not incidents where the youth are at fault.

I want to thank you guys for taking the time to come in and meet with us.

NEUSTADT: We did these trainings at a really pivotal moment for Baltimore that officers were working with really wanted to fix the tension just like the teenagers that we work with.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Building the relationships are critical for the survival of the city.

[12:55:02] We can go from complete chaos and harmony just on the backs of kids, and we saw that.

NEUSTADT: There really is a feeling of collective community in the space that was not there when we started this work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KOSIK: Sandra Bland's family says they're disappointed that a grand jury in Texas has decided not to indict anyone in her death. The 28- year-old was found dead in her cell at the Waller Jail on July 13th, three days after she was arrested for allegedly failing to use her turn signal.

Officials said that she hanged herself with a plastic bag. The family has questioned that account. Her sister called the grand jury system flawed and told CNN's Don Lemon last night, it's been a challenging year for the family.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHARON COOPER, SANDRA BLAND'S SISTER: I think, what's the most imperative to note on the family's behalf is that there is a little bit of disheartening there are a little disappointment, but quite frankly not surprise based off of the fact that we don't have much faith in the grand jury process due to the secretive nature of the process, and the fact that it is historically seen as viewed as a prosecutorial tool which in most cases is typically in the favor of the prosecutor. And to be quite honest, if a prosecutor wants an indictment, they know very well with evidence, they need to present to get that indictment, and if don't conversely, they know what evidence to withhold.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KOSIK: And a grand jury will be reconvening next month to consider other indictments. Thanks for watching "Legal View."

[13:00:11] Wolf Blitzer starts right now.