Police Raid Farm, Owner Demands Apology [Update]
Police raided a farm called the Garden of Eden, and its owner is demanding an apology.
A sustained living community in Arlington, Texas was recently raided when police thought it was a marijuana farm, as previously reported by The Inquisitr. On the morning of August 2, the Garden of Eden had been nearly destroyed, and thousands of pounds of innocent items had been confiscated, and the owner, Shellie Smith, is demanding an apology.
In their search for marijuana, police had taken plants, furniture, and food, and destroyed the sweet potatoes with a Weed Eater. The weeds they had been using to shade the crops had also been destroyed. After all of the damage the Arlington Police had allegedly caused, all they found were code violations and one resident with outstanding traffic citations.
The police who raided the farm say they did so with utmost respect, even though several residents had been handcuffed by armed SWAT police for at least half an hour while the raid was in progress. Sergeant Christopher Cook said that handcuffing is standard procedure for what was thought to be a drug bust. No drugs were found.
Quinn Eaker, 30, was the resident arrested over a warrant for unpaid parking tickets, and had some things to say about the raid, “We live a very peaceful life here. We’ve never hurt anybody. This is our land. We have the right to be secure in our person and our property. Period. That’s undebatable. … We had mass amounts of materials taken. If you saw the list, it’s pages and pages and pages of materials taken. That wasn’t junk. That wasn’t trash.”
WFAA: Arlington’s Garden of Eden seeks apology after police raid http://t.co/u7iDz3jkfU #dallas
— Dallas Feed (@FeedDallas) August 15, 2013
Police said that after an anonymous tip that Garden of Eden had been used to grow marijuana, they did an aerial search of the property and saw what they thought to be the plants in question. This combined with several code violations that owner Shellie Smith refused to fix, and they investigated via a drug raid. The plants turned out to just be tomatoes.
Shellie Smith has vowed that the situation will not be over until the police apologize for the raid.
What do you think of the police raiding a farm over what they thought was marijuana?
