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The Okemos Raid

December 15, 2016

It is 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning, December 7 and 11-month old Tiana won't stop fussing.

Tiana and her parents, Flamur and Ilijana Sejdiu, are staying with Bujar and Edona Dervishaj and their 4-month old son Adam at their apartment in Okemos, Michigan. Okemos is just east of East Lansing, home of Michigan State University, and about 30 miles northwest of Stockbridge. 

Flamur Sejdiu and Edona Dervishaj are brother and sister.  The Sejdius are staying with the Dervishajs while Flamur looks for a job. The heritage of the two couples is Kosovar Albanian.

To get Tiana to go to sleep, Flamur and Ilijana take her for a ride around the huge Cedar Creek apartment complex in a SUV that belongs to Bujar's brother Gazmund. Bujar and Gazmund own the Tim Horton's/Coldstone Creamery at Okemos and Jolly roads. This is the Sejdius' nightly routine, although they normally don't use Gazmund's SUV.

Tiana especially likes the speed bumps.

At approximately 1:30, Meridian Township Police Officer Erin Linn is dispatched to the Cedar Creek Apartments in Okemos in response to a complaint that a white SUV is repeatedly driving around the parking lot. Officer Linn responds to the scene at 1:48, but is unable to locate the SUV. Less than a half hour later, however, she listens in on the radio transmissions in the pursuit of the white SUV in Stockbridge. She calls Ingham County Central Dispatch and tells them about the 1:30 report of a suspicious SUV at the Cedar Creek Apartments. (incident report)

State and local police are already on alert for a white SUV. Several officers go to the Cedar Creek complex and not only find a white SUV - a 2015 GMC Yukon - but observe that it has no frost on it, unlike other cars in the lot. Its hood is warm to the touch. They determine that it is registered to Gazmund Dervishaj and that one of the apartments in the complex is rented to Bujar Dervishaj.

Although it would seem unlikely that an SUV seen in Okemos at 1:30 could have been involved in a chase in Stockbridge - a minimum of 35 minutes away - at 2:02, that does not eliminate the apartment occupants as suspects in the minds of the officers. They have a white SUV with a warm hood. At least 12 officers converge on the scene, some of them Michigan State Police and some from Meridian Township. None of them insists on getting a search warrant before approaching the apartment, probably because they know they do not have probable cause.

In the Dervishaj apartment, Edona, Bujar and Adam are sleeping in one bedroom, Ilijana and Tiana in the other. Flamur is sleeping on the living room couch. Suddenly, at around 3:10 a.m., there is a loud, persistent knocking on the door and voices announcing that it is the Michigan State Police. Bujar comes out of the bedroom and opens the door. Five or six officers rush in and threaten the two couples with automatic weapons ("weapons on low ready," as they say later in the incident report), ordering them out of the apartment and into the hallway where they are forced to face the wall with their arms stretched above them. The police tell the men "you are being detained for our safety." The women, Ilijana and Edona, can only hold one arm up because they are clutching their infants in the other. The men, Bujar and Flamur, are handcuffed. They are in underwear or night clothes and not allowed to get dressed. Bujar complains that his hand is going numb because the cuff on his right wrist is too tight. His requests to loosen the cuffs are refused. They are told not to ask questions and not to talk. Bujar's request for water is denied. The women are ordered back into the apartment at gunpoint and questioned separately. They are told that their parental rights will be terminated and the children will end up with Child Protective Services. (LSJ, 11/10/2015 and lawsuit) The women say they have no idea what is going on. Ilijana tells the police she thought Flamur was in the living room and hadn't gone anywhere.

In his book To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police, Norm Stamper says one of the most common complaints he received as sergeant was cuffs applied too tight. "All law enforcement officers are instructed to "double lock" the cuffs, meaning the bracelets can no longer be ratcheted tighter, thereby biting into the wrists of the person in custody." (page 105)

The men are arrested and put in separate cars. They leave the complex parking lot at 4:24 and are driven to the Lansing State Police post on 7119 N. Canal Road.  At 4:58 they are taken out of the cars and escorted into the building, still in handcuffs. The SUV is towed to the post by Shroyer Towing.

Bujar is the first to be interviewed, starting at 6:30 a.m. The interviewers are MSP Detective Sergeant Kyle McPhee and MSP Detective Trooper Troy Johnston. Bujar is extremely forthcoming and cooperative, assuring the detectives that he never left the apartment after midnight. He has no idea why they were arrested, and they don't tell him. After 30 minutes, they leave him alone to write a statement of his activities that evening. They return after 20 minutes and end the interview at 7:22.

Next up is Flamur. His interview starts at 7:33. He is cooperative but not as talkative as Bujar. He has a noticeable accent. Since his wife and baby Tiana share a bed, he sleeps in the living room, so the detectives think it is possible that he slipped out after the couple got back from driving Tiana around the complex. He insists that he never left. They mention Stockbridge; he has never heard of the place. Although there is no evidence that anyone in the apartment left after 1:00 a.m., and lulling Tiana to sleep explains the warm car, there is one thing that bothers the detectives. When Officer Linn responded to the complaint about the SUV driving around the Cedar Creek parking lot, she could not find it, and she had the license number. It was provided by the person who made the complaint. So if no one in the apartment took the SUV out between 1:00 and 2:00, where was it at 1:30? The detectives question Flamur for 30 minutes and then leave him to write a statement of his activities that night. He finishes in 12 minutes and then sits alone for 49 minutes. The detectives return, question him for another 38 minutes, then leave again. After another 24 minutes, they return and take him out of the room. It is 10:08 Sunday morning.

While Flamur is waiting in the interview room, a detective calls Ilijana and tells her her husband will remain in custody unless she agrees to be transported to the State Police post for an interview. She consents. Two officers arrive at the apartment, drop off Bujar Dervishaj, and take Ilijana to the State Police post. She is not allowed to bring Tiana. Ilijana's interview starts immediately after Flamur's. She is sure Flamur did not leave after she, Flamur and Tiana got back from their drive. Her interview lasts 33 minutes. It is 10:42 a.m., more than seven hours after that loud knock on the apartment door.

Flamur and Ilijana are transported back to the apartment in Okemos. They don't get Gazmund's SUV back until Monday.

A possible answer to the mystery of why Officer Lynn could not find Gazmund Dervishaj's white SUV appears in her incident report. She says she drove the south drive of the complex, then parked at the east end to do clerical and watch for the vehicle. The Dervishaj apartment is in building A, which is on the north side, west end. The complex is huge, with eight 2-story buildings and 254 units.

Examination of the SUV itself in the light of day eliminates it as the suspect vehicle. MSP Detective Sergeant Kyle McPhee testifies at John Kelsey's trial that it was "nearly brand new" and "very clean." The tires "still had the small stems sticking off of them," (V7-97) which would not be expected of a vehicle that had just been in a 100-mph chase on back country roads.

In October of 2015, the two couples file a lawsuit against the State Police and Meridian Township. They settle in July 2016 for $100,000, $75,000 from the State Police and $25,000 from Meridian Township.