More than seven years after two Texas cops snatched a teenaged girl they erroneously claimed had been "abandoned," a federal jury has concluded that the officers violated her Fourth Amendment rights by unreasonably seizing her from her home. In a verdict delivered last week, the jurors said that seizure also violated her parents' due process rights under the 14th Amendment. And they agreed that one of the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment by "conducting an unreasonable search" of the family's "refrigerator and freezer" without a warrant, consent, or exigent circumstances. In the second phase of the trial, the jurors approved $175,000 in compensatory damages and $125,000 in punitive damages.
The verdict validates constitutional claims that Megan and Adam McMurry made in a federal lawsuit they filed in October 2020, two years after Officers Alexandra Weaver and Kevin Brunner, both of whom worked for the Midland Independent School District, visited their apartment and left with their daughter, Jade, then 14. That intervention, the jury concluded, was not justified in the circumstances, since Jade was not in any danger. The verdict "was vindicating after having our lives turned upside down and trampled through for the past seven and a half years," Megan McMurry told KMID, the ABC affiliate in Midland.
