Posted on 08/19/2002 4:58:54 AM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
A crowd of angry teenagers and their parents accused police Sunday of arresting many innocent bystanders during an overnight raid on a west Houston parking lot where youths apparently congregate. Scores of Houston police officers swarmed onto the Kmart parking lot in the 8400 block of Westheimer about 12:30 a.m. Sunday and arrested about 425 people for criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.
Houston Police Department spokesman Martin DeLeon said many cars were towed. DeLeon said business owners have been complaining about youths gathering on their parking lots on weekend nights and causing a commotion. DeLeon said he did not have more details about the incident because the two captains in charge of the raid, M.A. Aguirre and J.P. Mokwa, were sleeping Sunday after working all night.
The Kmart store is open 24 hours a day, and many of the people at the HPD station at 61 Reisner said Sunday that they had simply been shopping or eating at a Sonic drive-in restaurant that adjoins the discount store's parking lot when they were arrested. Kmart and Sonic supervisors referred all questions to their corporate headquarters, which were not open Sunday.
"We went to use the restroom at Kmart and to buy a Scrunchi (hair band), and when we came back to our car, cops were coming in (the parking lot) and they tied our hands," said Brandi Ratliff, 18, who said she was a straight-A student at Waller High School and never had any problems with the law. Ratliff said that even though she and two friends told police they had just come out of the Kmart, all three were arrested and spent the night in jail.
"It was traumatic," said a tearful Ratliff on Sunday morning after her parents drove from Stafford to pay her $300 bail at the downtown city jail. "It was sick where they were holding us. A prostitute was fighting with another woman. The food they served was food you would serve to a dog, not a human."
Ratliff and her two friends, Kris Karsteter, 21, and Kyesa Scott, 18, all had pink marks on their wrists from where they said police had tied plastic handcuffs too tightly. Scott said she didn't have the money to pay bail and so she pleaded guilty to avoid spending another night in jail. Emily Demmler, 19, said: "All I was doing was eating ice cream."
Demmler said the only trouble she'd previously had with authorities was being called into the principal's office twice in elementary school for gossiping. She said she pulled her car into the Sonic lot shortly after midnight so she and her two friends could get some ice cream after a night of karaoke. After about five minutes, police "just swarmed," Demmler said.
"We thought we were in the middle of a drug bust, and we thought, `We're cool; we're not doing anything wrong,' " said Demmler, a part-time lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center who is starting college this fall at the University of Houston. Instead, all the patrons at the Sonic were ordered by police to march to the Kmart lot, where they joined throngs of other people who were being arrested, she said.
"My purse and my friend's purse were still in the car ... but the cop wouldn't let me get them," said Demmler, whose mother eventually recovered her car and both purses. "We asked police why we were being arrested, and they said, `Everybody is receiving equal treatment from the Houston Police Department tonight.' It didn't matter what you were doing; they arrested you."
Demmler said many youths appearing to be 13 or 14 were arrested and taken to juvenile detention facilities, adding, "They even arrested a 10-year-old girl who was having dinner with her father and took her to juvenile detention. "She got separated from her father and I asked her how old she was, and she told me she was 10," Demmler said. "She was dazed."
In a phone interview, Demmler claimed to have "huge marks on my arms" from tight handcuffs. Leanne Williams said her 19-year-old son called her from jail and told her he showed police a receipt for bottled water from Kmart, but he was still arrested. She said her son called her five times from the downtown jail, but police still couldn't locate him at 11 a.m. because his paperwork had been delayed.
"I gotta spend my Sunday at the jail searching for my son they can't find," said her husband, Jerome Williams. Soneary Sy didn't know her 17-year-old son, a straight-A student, was arrested until he called her at 6 a.m. "I didn't sleep all night waiting for my son to come home" said a sobbing Sy, a Cambodian immigrant who moved to Houston 22 years ago. "He tried to go to Kmart and as soon as he got to Kmart he was arrested."
Read that again slowly, AppyPappy.
You could have also added in your post it's the summer-- no school. The girl said she "was a straight-A student," which seems to indicate she graduated. And her being 18 is an adult.
Obviously, Houston is so free of violent criminals that they have time to stage massive 'misdemeanor' arrests like this... Maybe I need to move there, if it's that nice...
I think in the current lingo its called "flexing". We used to call it crusing, but back then we had 400 horsepower, now they have 400 watts.
Most of the K-Marts or WalMarts in our area have security guards for the overnight hours.
I'd wager a bet that the security guards had asked this crowd to disperse, and when they didn't they called the cops.
In our area, a kid hanging out with a bunch of other kids in a parking lot was killed during an altercation. Of course, now the parents are bringing a suit against the establishment for allowing the kids to loiter.
Betcha if somebody in the crowd had gotten hurt while they were in the KMart parking lot, the parents would have a lawsuit against KMart for negligence and not monitoring the activity on their property.
In our litigious society, you can't win either way.
Some of them do more than make them "look fast". The reason the Acura Integra is the most stolen car in the US is because the chop shops sell the engines to these little "pocket-rocket" builders as "drop-in" fits to the Honda Accords and Civics. It seems the Integra engine will withstand "souping up" to higher horsepower better than the stock Honda engines.
Not my bag--I prefer American iron (preferably mid sixties Ford).
Because she was violating the law?
Seems like everyone interviews was innocent, doesn't it? I'm 100% sure kids in the lot have been a problem. It was probably a mix of many different kids from different "crowds", with you "street racers", hooligans and probably some decent kids. The stories of "I just stopped for ice cream" or "I just bought bottles water" are quite funny. I'm supposed to believe that many kids, in the same age range as the rest, just happened to stop at the local hang-out at 12:30 to do some innocent shopping? LOL!!!
I worked retail when i was younger - sometimes late at night. No employee, or manager or owner is going to approach a large group after dark. And I mean large by more than nine or ten. This was over 400 people. Nothing they could do but call the cops.
I imagine that it's pretty easy to lose site of your 10 year old when the police put you in one paddy wagon and the kid in a different one.
I took my 12 year old out to see the last Star Wars movie on it's opening weekend. The only showing that we could get tickets for was 10:00 PM. When the movie was over, we went to Steak and Shake to eat. If this had happened to me and my kid, the police department would have to go to the city for a tax increase to pay off the court judgement that I would have sued them for. These cops need to use their brains and get off of their little power trip.
You're joking, right? Just a coincidence that all these "innocent" kids were at the local hang-out at 12:30? I mean, just a coincidence, right? Shopping? Buying ice cream? A scrunchie? At 12:30? At the local hang out?
Good for you.
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