SWAT team raids Cloverdale home

Santa Rosa police invaded a Cloverdale home Tuesday, detaining five adults and three children for several hours.

Ultimately no one was arrested from the home, and the children were released to the adults, Santa Rosa Police Lt. Steve Bair said.

Just before noon, the sound of explosions jolted the north Cloverdale neighborhood near Jefferson Elementary School as officers joined by the Sonoma County sheriff's SWAT team surrounded the home and ordered the residents out, neighbors said.

Santa Rosa Police officials would not describe what led them to the tidy two-story home on North Jefferson Place. The raid was apparently one of several staged around the county led by the Police Department.

"We are working a large-scale operation," Bair said.

Agents surrounded the gray house with green trim and were poised with guns drawn when, a few doors down, Dorothy Buseth, 80, stepped out to the curb just before 11:30 a.m. to put out the mail.

"They were in the road and all over the place," Buseth said. "They told me to get back into the house so I did. My dog kept barking."

"They made a lot of noise, big bangs, at least five," said Lamar Haas, who has lived in the neighborhood nearly 22 years. "I came out, an officer told me to go back in."

The residents had been renting the two-story home near Portofino Way less than two years, Haas said.

Two men and three women, all between 20 and 40 years old, sat with their arms handcuffed behind them in the shade of a tree next door as officers searched the home. With them were three children, two who appeared to be under 10 and a toddler.

Several cars were parked out front, including a Ford pickup, Buick and Acura sedans. Tires were stacked in the backyard just inside an open gate. The steep backyard leads to houses perched above on a hill.

Haas, an auto mechanic hobbyist, said the residents kept a fairly low profile in the quiet neighborhood. "They seemed all right," Haas said. "This is Cloverdale."

However, he and several other neighbors had noticed people and cars coming and going often from the home, and it was unclear how many people lived there.

The adults were eventually led into a black van and taken away. Bair said they were interviewed and released.

Santa Rosa police were leading the investigation, with the aid of the sheriff's SWAT unit as well as agents from Windsor police and the FBI.

"It is ongoing right now," Bair said late Tuesday.