The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. She was standing at a mattress-size grill outside. “Have you looked it up?” Boatright asked me when I met her this spring at Houston’s H&H Saloon, where she runs Steak Night every Monday. Outraged by their experience in Tenaha, Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson helped to launch a class-action lawsuit challenging the abuse of a legal doctrine known as civil-asset forfeiture.
ORGANIZED TRIO ACTIVATION KEY DRIVERS
“Be safe and keep up the good work,” the city marshal wrote to Washington, following a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband. Later, she learned that cash-for-freedom deals had become a point of pride for Tenaha, and that versions of the tactic were used across the country. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears. “Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options.
The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.) According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway. He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with BIG Potential!” This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S.
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