Police Seize White Teenage Girl from Black Legal Guardians Without Cause

Not the ideal example that racism still exists, but still:

A teenage Oklahoma hip hop dancer is still shaken after her dream trip to a Texas dance studio ended up with her in handcuffs and taken to Child Protective Services and her guardians in police custody. 

"They had nothing on us," dance instructor Emmanuel Hurd told ABCNews.com. "Instead of going the route they should have went, they took her to CPS. The only reason someone gave me was we were black and Landry was white." 

Landry Thompson, 13, has been dancing since she was 7. For the past few years, she has dreamed of traveling to Houston to dance with well-known hip hop dancer Chachi Gonzales at Planet Funk Academy. 

Over the weekend, Thompson's parents, instructor and dance partner made her dream come true. Landry flew to Houston from her Tulsa, Okla., home on Saturday and met up with Hurd, 29, and her dance partner Josiah Kelly, 22. 

The three spent the day at the dance academy and taking part in a video shoot. After wrapping and dinner, the exhausted trio stopped at a gas station around 3 a.m. to program their GPS to find their hotel, according to Hurd. He dozed off and awoke to find their car surrounded by police. 

"Everything was going amazing. It was a beautiful day .... and then everything went bad," Hurd told ABCNews.com today. 

Hurd and Kelly were pulled out of the car and police told them not to worry, they weren't be arrested, just detained, Hurd said. 

Hurd had forms from Landry's mother making him her guardian for the duration of the trip, her birth certificate and her insurance card, among other forms, which he said he tried to tell the officers. 

"[The officer] puts the handcuffs on very, very tight [and] throws me in the back and does the same to Josiah," Hurd said. "All the while I'm looking at Landry. She's terrified." 

Landry, still in the car, said she called her mother. 

"I was crying. I tried to put the police on the phone with my mom and they said they didn't want to," she told ABCNews.com. 

The teen said she was terrified and that the cops didn't believe she was giving them her real name, since she wasn't on the runaway list. 

Landry's mom, Destiny Thompson, said she wasn't surprised by the late-night call because rehearsals often go late into the night, but could tell something was wrong when she heard the commotion in the background and her daughter's upset voice. 

A police officer eventually took Landry's phone and spoke to her mother. 

"He got on the phone and he said, 'Are you aware your daughter is in Houston, Texas, with two black men?' And I said, 'Yes, I am aware of that,'" Destiny Thompson told ABCNews.com. "Then he started mumbling stuff about my parenting, why I would let her do that and then he proceeded to tell me the people she was with were intoxicated or on something." 

"There's no possible way these men were intoxicated, that's not how they live," the mom said. "I knew right then I had some trouble." 

RELATED:  Racism Not a Problem Anymore? Don't Be Ridiculous, It's Still a Big Issue

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Sunday School Teacher To Face Death In Killing Of 8-Year-Old Girl

CNN.com:

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a former California Sunday school teacher accused of killing an 8-year-old girl earlier this year.

Melissa Huckaby, 28, was indicted last month in the death of Sandra Cantu, a playmate of Huckaby's daughter. Huckaby lived in the same mobile home park as Cantu and her family in Tracy, California.

Sandra's body was found April 6, stuffed into a suitcase and submerged in a pond at a dairy farm. She was last seen alive March 27 in the mobile home park.

Huckaby is charged with kidnapping and murdering Sandra, according to the indictment, along with lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14 and rape by instrument. She pleaded not guilty in June, but entered another not guilty plea on Thursday at a hearing, minutes of which were provided to CNN by a court spokeswoman.

Prosecutors said at the hearing Thursday they plan to seek the death penalty.

Huckaby is the granddaughter of Clifford Lane Lawless, pastor of Clover Road Baptist Church near the mobile home park, and she taught Sunday school at the church, police said.

The church was searched as part of the investigation into Sandra's disappearance and death.

I've been following this story for awhile now and can't help but to have noticed the lack of attention given to it by the mainstream press. Makes me wonder if Melissa Huckaby being a woman has played into it, esp. considering how heinous the crime was and how the press, I feel, is biased towards violence against white women. Still, if Melissa Huckaby is found guilty, she should be given a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. The death penalty is forever wrong in my book.

Prayers For Stepha Henry And Her Loved Ones

Stepha Henry (who I blogged about back in June last year) wasn't Natalee Holloway or Laci Peterson or even Jennifer "Missing Bride" Wilbanks. In other words, she wasn't a young, pretty, missing white woman. Instead Stepha happened to be black and unfortunately her race cost her the attention of cable news networks and morning news shows nationally who don't give near as much coverage to missing minorities as they do missing white women. So you can't be blamed if you've never heard of Stepha Henry. And now, despite the ignorance of the national media, tragically, after almost a year of being missing, the answer to Henry's disappearance has finally arrived:

The New York City Police Department this week arrested a suspect in the death of Stepha Henry, who has been missing since May 29, 2007. Kendrick Lincoln Williams was arrested on Jan. 15, police said. He was charged with second-degree murder and tampering with evidence, even though Henry’s body has not yet been recovered.

Miami-Dade Police spokesman Roy Rutland said a significant amount of blood – which a forensic analysis determined to be Henry’s – was found in Williams’ Acura Integra, leaving police to believe that she is dead.

Henry, 22, and her sister, Shola, were on vacation during the Memorial Day 2007 weekend. The two sisters were staying with their aunt, Carletha Clarke, in Miami Gardens.

The arrest came after a team of detectives, including two from Florida, found Williams asleep in a car near a Brooklyn pier, police said. Authorities believe he had been living in the vehicle. Police said they had forensic evidence, including blood from Henry found in the black sedan that Williams was driving the night Henry disappeared.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Stepha Henry.

Shed Few Tears For Emily Sander

Sad, but not shocking:

Authorities said the preliminary physical description of the body found about 50 miles east of El Dorado matches that of missing college student Emily Sander. Investigators refused to give details about the state of the body or how it was found.

Sander's case drew wide attention after it was revealed that she appeared nude on a popular adult Web site under the name Zoey Zane. That site was temporarily inaccessible Thursday, as were several sites that bill themselves as "fan" sites of Zane.

But Police Chief Tom Boren insisted Thursday that Sander's Internet activity had no connection to her disappearance.

"The issue of the Internet and the spinoff of that has been literally crippling our investigation," Boren said. Police said publicity about Sander's explicit photos brought a flood of tips, many of them false leads.

Boren said the cause of death was not yet known. An autopsy is planned.

So yet another national alert goes up for a Pretty Young Missing White Girl (meanwhile, some two years later, Stepha Henry is still missing and CNN, CBS, MBNBC, et al could care less about that) and it turns out that she was a budding porno star on the side. Yet, the police, who seemed to have just found the body, want us to believe that there's no possible link between Emily Sander's lifestyle choice and her death.

Yeah ok.

Emily Sander was not a wholesome girl, she was a porn starlet who had over 30,000 subscribers on her adult website. One can imagine that she led a life that was not only exceedingly immoral, but fast, loose and dangerous. Yet, one has to wonder what would make any young woman want to live a life of porn? But we don't have to look any farther than the world we live in to answer that question. After all, we live in a world where we duck from personal responsibility and core moral values are being undermined the media and MTV--to the point that even the dirty and disgusting porno industry is becoming more and more accepted in mainstream society. And Sander's family was supposed to be "shocked" at the news that the young girl was an internet porn queen? Or is is that the family is just ducking from the responsibility they had in the girl's life? It's far less likely that the family are behaving honestly if they had permissive feelings concerning towards moral issues like divorce, sex, homosexuality and abortion. Far more likely that Emily Sander would still be alive if God, values and self-respect had played an important role in her life.