BY LEE HEDGEPETH AND NEXSTAR MEDIA WIRE
VALLEY, Ala. (WIAT) – One of the officers who’d come to arrest Martha Menefield, an 82-year-old Black woman, for failure to pay a $77 trash bill, told her not to cry.
The officer had tapped her on the back, she said. She was already in handcuffs.
“Don’t cry, Ms. Martha,” she recalled him saying. “He kind of whispered it to me: ‘Don’t cry.’”
When two officers pulled up outside her home in Valley, Alabama, on Sunday, Menefield didn’t know why they were there. She said the officers — one white, one Black — got out of their patrol car and approached her home. One of the officers said they were there to arrest her for failure to pay her trash bill.
Menefield just laughed. She genuinely thought the officer was joking.
He didn’t budge.
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