Did Houston police illegally arrest three teens? Landry Thompson is 13 years old, white, and a dancer. She was traveling from her home in Oklahoma to Houston, Texas, with her dance instructors, who are both Black.
Thompson’s mother had given them a signed and notarized letter giving full guardianship and custody to dance instructor Emmanuel Hurd, for their trip to meet with other dance teachers. But Houston police managed to handcuff the teens and wrest the girl from her guardian — and hand her over to Child Protective Services.
Hurd told KHOU that the three dancers where parked at a gas station, and “were on the GPS trying to figure out where the hotel was.” That’s when the cops “just pulled us out of the car and put our hands behind our backs like we were criminals.”
“The officer asked me ‘who’s the girl?’ and I said ‘she’s my student,’” Hurd says. “I told him I had a notarized letter from her parents stating that we have full guardianship over her while we’re here.”
Not only did Houston police detain and handcuff Thompson and Hurd, but they removed the teenaged girl from her guardian and gave her to local Child Protective Services. Police “put handcuffs on me and it really scared me,” Thompson says. “And they put me in the back of a cop car and I was terrified.”
Cops initially demanded Thompson’s mother travel from Oklahoma to Houston to retrieve her child, but later allowed her to be released back in Hurd’s custody.
“She was with the people I wanted her to be with,” Destiny Thompson says. “She was with people I trusted. And now she was taken away from those people and in a shelter with people I didn’t know.”
