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The ATF waited almost a year before dispatching compliance inspector Thomas Scoufis to check the elder Katona's records. In the process he stumbled across records of the son's purchases and quickly became suspicious, according to an ATF affidavit. He showed Beran a form with the chief's own signature, but Beran said he could not have signed it; he had honored the moratorium.
Scoufis alerted ATF's Cleveland office. Soon afterward, special agent Lance Kimmell met with Beran and showed him more forms bearing his signature but dated after his letter to Katona. The chief denied signing them. In a deposition, Kimmell said, "I had all the probable cause in the world to believe that the firearms had been transferred illegally, and there had been a mass forgery of documents that took place."
A federal magistrate agreed and on May 7, 1992, authorized a search warrant. In contrast with a recent N.R.A. ad that showed a photograph of ATF agents in battle gear rushing toward the reader, the raiding party that stormed Bucyrus the next morning consisted of three ATF agents, one in a suit, the rest casually dressed. No one brandished any weapons. As a matter of protocol, they invited Bucyrus police officer Jerry Agee to come along.
While Agee and special agent Stephen Wells waited outside Katona's house, agent Kimmell and group supervisor Stephen St. Pierre went to Katona's office and waited for him to return from an errand. They told him they had a warrant to search his house. As the search began, according to Officer Agee, Katona offered the raiders "coffee and pop."
Katona charges that Kimmell handled the guns roughly. "He started holding the guns one at a time up to his belt level and turning [to] me and giving me a little sneer and dropping them one at a time on the concrete," Katona stated in a deposition. Officer Agee told ATF Internal Affairs investigators the height was more like three to six inches. Agent Wells said he and his colleagues took good care of the guns.
But the most infamous moment came midway through the search when Katona's pregnant wife Kimberly arrived, furious at the intrusion and embarrassed that the agents would see her laundry room. Seconds later, the Katonas say, ATF supervisor St. Pierre grabbed Kimberly and "slammed" her against a wall, shouting, "Get this woman the hell out of here." But agent Agee and lawyer James Pry both said the agents did not handle Mrs. Katona roughly.
She began bleeding that night, the Katonas charge, the beginning of a miscarriage. Ten days later she underwent a pelvic ultrasound examination, but medical records obtained by Time show this exam yielded an unexpected discovery: an "intrauterine gestational sac without embryonic echoes, suggesting a blighted ovum." Three specialists, asked by Time to review Kimberly Katona's records, agree in their conclusion: she had lost her baby well before the raid even began. The sac was empty, but her body had continued to develop as if the pregnancy were viable. Says Ilan Timor, head of Columbia University's obstetrics-gynecology ultrasound unit: "That bleeding would have come sooner or later anyway, whether there had been a raid or not."