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.”