Texas Mom Sues Cops for Arresting Her After Leaving Kids Home Alone

For many of you this probably isn't even that far or a stretch, but imagine you have a spouse who is deployed overseas and two children ages 12 and 14. They are responsible kids who are accustomed to looking after themselves, one has perfect attendance and the other is distance learning, on her own. So, like I said they're responsible.

The cops had the apartment building manager knock on the family's door. Jade answered and the cops told her she shouldn't be home alone. Jade started crying and asked to call her dad, McMurry says. But the cops wouldn't allow it. They did allow her to change into warmer clothes, since they were going to take her away for an interrogation. She managed to text her dad, "I'm scared! The police are here."

Now, let's say that you have a job opportunity in another country, of course you want to look into before uprooting your kids and shuttling them across the Atlantic Ocean, right?

Well, your 12-year-old doesn't want to miss school and you trust your 14-year-old completely to watch after herself and her little brother. So you implement anything your kids will need.

You ask trusted friend to keep an eye on them and be there in case a situation that they can't handle arises. You set up rides for your kids so that they can be where they need to be. You do everything necessary for these two responsible children to take care of themselves, pat yourself on the back, and you take off to explore this new job opportunity -- one that would reunite your kids with their deployed father in Kuwait.

No big deal, right? Well, you might think that but in this case it became a HUGE deal.

In 2018, Megan McMurry was a special education teacher at a Midland junior high school and was presented with the opportunity to reunite her family in Kuwait. After she took all the steps that a responsible parent would, she left her kids at home and went to Kuwait. Upon her return she was arrested.

You can get more details of the situation here. But it appears to us, and a jury, that these two resource officers way over-reached their scope of responsibility. And didn't even pump the breaks when Child Protective Services told them as much.

In a big win for the family, a federal judge has ruled that two cops who work at a public school in Midland, Texas, will not enjoy blanket qualified immunity, ruled U.S. District Judge David Counts, and can be sued for seizing a 14-year-old from her family's apartment because she was there alone.

And suing the officers is now exactly what mom, Megan McMurry, is doing. 

As it turns out, McMurry's daughter has become one of her mom's star witnesses. 14-year-old Jade wrote that she wants everyone "to know what these two officers did to me and my family for no reason. My parents have taught me to work hard for anything I want and to self-advocate," wrote Jade. "I may not have known my rights that day, and they definitely didn't inform me either, but I knew what they were doing was wrong."

“MISD completely turned my life and the lives of my entire family upside down for no reason,” Megan McMurry told the Reporter-Telegram. “It is time for them to be held accountable for their actions, so this doesn’t ever happen to another family.”

What do you think? And if you'd like to know more about what type of charges a parent can face for leaving their child alone in Texas, check this out.