Thinking that the car was possibly stolen, police engaged in a “high-risk traffic stop” on the Dallas North Tollway, with officers drawing their guns and ordering a mother and her sixth-grade son to exit the vehicle. Police said the family “may get shot” if they reached into the car, according to body-camera footage released Friday.
Even though the woman, who is Black, repeatedly told police that they owned the car and corrected an officer who had wrongly said they were from Arizona, police handcuffed the son as his mother cried out.
“Please don’t let them do that to my baby,” she said, according to video. “Why is my baby in cuffs? What are you all doing? Do not treat my baby this way.”
More than 15 minutes later, officers realized the license plate data was inputted incorrectly. Police acknowledged the mistake, released the boy from handcuffs and apologized to the family.
“We made a mistake,” Frisco Police Chief David Shilson said in a statement, confirming that police entered “an incorrect registration return, leading the officer to believe that the vehicle was possibly stolen.”
“Our department will not hide from its mistakes. Instead, we will learn from them,” he said.
Frisco Police Sgt. Eliu Andrade told The Washington Post that the incident is under investigation.
“Any discipline related to the stop is still being determined,” Andrade said in an email.
The stop has left the woman, identified on TikTok under the user name DemiJanale, and her Little Rock family traumatized, she said.
“We were completely humiliated and threatened to be shot without given a reason,” she wrote in a caption to one of the TikTok videos she shared last week. “The experience in itself was beyond frightening but seeing this video of my innocent baby has hurt me to my core.”
She said in a separate video, “I just can’t make sense of this.”
It’s unclear whether the family has retained a lawyer or plans to press charges. The mother did not immediately respond to a request for comment. David Henderson, a civil rights attorney who reviewed the body-cam video but is not involved with the case, told the Dallas Morning News that the woman being Black and telling police that she had a licensed firearm in the vehicle played a role in the family potentially being racially profiled.
“In cases I’ve seen involving people of color who have a license to carry, as soon as they alert the police to the fact that they have a weapon, the police change drastically in terms of how they deal with them,” he said.
At around 8:30 a.m. on July 23, the family had left a Residence Inn in Frisco, about 30 miles north of Dallas, and were on their way to an AAU basketball game that morning, the woman recalled on TikTok. The group included the woman, her son, her husband, who coaches their AAU team, and her nephew, she said.
But as they were pulling out of the parking lot, an officer spotted their Dodge Charger — a vehicle that is frequently stolen, according to police — and ran a computer check on the vehicle’s license plate. After the officer mistakenly punched in the plate as being from Arizona, police believed the car to be potentially stolen, authorities said. The police vehicle trailed the family’s vehicle for several minutes on the highway before turning on its lights, DemiJanale said on TikTok.
“I didn’t really think nothing of it because I literally just pulled from the hotel,” said the mother, who was driving the Charger.
The video shows that when the car pulls over on the Dallas North Tollway, a male officer draws his pistol and points it in the direction of the car, and shouts at the woman to slowly exit the vehicle and for everyone in the car to hold their hands out the window. After the woman tells the officer that she has a licensed gun in the glove compartment, the officer replies, “If you reach in that car, you may get shot, so be careful. Do not reach in the car.”
“I make a complete circle, they tell me to just keep my hands up or they’ll shoot,” the mother said on TikTok. “They made that very clear.”
The woman is heard crying in horror as police handcuff her, according to video: “What did I do?”
“Is that your tag on the vehicle?” a female officer asks.
“Yeah, I’m from Arkansas … I’m a nurse, I’ve never done anything in my life,” the mother replies. She later adds: “This is scaring the hell out of me. I have bad anxiety.”
After the officer says the woman should “go have a conversation with Arizona” about her registration, the driver corrects her to say the plates are from Arkansas. At that point, police put her son in handcuffs.
“This is very traumatizing,” she said of the situation, according to the body-cam footage. “My son is who y’all just put in that car!”
The woman’s husband is heard on the video describing the scene as “a terrible experience.”
“We’re just in a basketball tournament,” he says to police. As he explains that he was a basketball coach, the man’s son could be heard crying on the video.
“I got conceal carry … Y’all put a gun on my son for no reason,” he tells the officers, according to video. He adds, “You all got to do your job, but we’re all legit.”
Nearly 20 minutes pass before other officers on scene let the officer know that the check of the license plate was done in the wrong state.
“For real?” the female officer asks.
Another officer tells his female colleague, “They were run out of Arizona.”
That’s when the female officer returns and admits the traffic stop happened due to a police error.
“It looks like I made a mistake,” the officer tells the family after the stop was called off, according to video. “So I ran it AZ for Arizona, instead of AR — and that’s what happened. … That’s on me.”
The woman’s husband appears to be furious when told by officers of the mix-up that had guns drawn on them and her son in handcuffs.
“It could have went all wrong for us,” he says. “They yell out, ‘Don’t move or we’ll shoot.’ We could have all gotten killed.”
Shilson, the police chief, commended the officer involved for quickly accepting responsibility, “which speaks to integrity.”
“I’ve spoken with the family. I empathize with them and completely understand why they’re upset,” Shilson said in a statement. “I apologized on behalf of our department and assured them that we will hold ourselves accountable and provide transparency through the process.”
Days after the incident, DemiJanale said the family is still reeling from the incident. She said her husband later told her how her nephew was “literally screaming for his life, and telling him ‘Uncle, we are about to die. We are about to die.’ ” The woman said on TikTok that no apology could erase the image of being held at gunpoint by police and her son in handcuffs over a mistake that could have been prevented.
“Every time I see the video of my baby, I just can’t believe it,” she said. “I feel like this is a very bad dream.”
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