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.
When 2 officers pulled up outside her Valley, Alabama home on Sunday, Menefield didn’t know why they were there. She said the officers – 1 white, 1 Black – got out of their patrol car & 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.
“You’re not kidding?” She recalled asking him. He wasn’t. He was there to arrest her for failure to pay $77.80. She thought the bill had already been paid, “but they said it hadn’t.”
Menefield said the officers told her they would have to place her in handcuffs. She put her hands behind her back. The front will do, they told her.
Menefield slowed as she told the story. She held her arms out in front her. “And the cuffs,” she said, her eyes swelling with tears. “They’re so heavy.”
When the officer told her not to cry, Menefield looked back at him.
“How would you feel if they came & arrested your grandmama,” she asked the officer. He didn’t respond.
“I’m just happy my grandkids weren’t here to see that,” Menefield said, her voice shaking. “That would have upset them. I was so ashamed. And it’s been bothering me.”
“This isn’t a criminal act,” Menefield’s daughter, Neketti Tucker said. “This is civil, if anything.”
Menefield said she wasn’t in the Valley Jail for long, but believes she should’ve never been there to begin with.
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