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Episode: The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 1

Author: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Duration: 00:28:17

Episode Shownotes

A police officer in Rutherford County, Tenn., sees a video of little kids fighting, and decides to investigate. This leads to the arrest of 11 kids for watching the fight. The arrests do not go smoothly. From Serial Productions and The New York Times in partnership with ProPublica and Nashville

Public Radio, “The Kids of Rutherford County” is reported and hosted by Meribah Knight, a Peabody-award winning reporter based in the South. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [email protected]

Summary

In the first episode of 'The Kids of Rutherford County,' a police officer's discovery of a video showing young children involved in a fight leads to the unexpected arrests of 11 children who were simply witnesses. This event raises critical questions about bullying, law enforcement's reaction to minor conflicts, and the implications for the children's lives. The arrests, executed under the premise of addressing bullying, resulted in significant distress among the children and their families, revealing systemic issues in the juvenile justice system as community outrage mounted over the treatment of minors.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Kids of Rutherford County - Ep. 1) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_07
These first two episodes of The Kids of Rutherford County are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all serial production shows and all The New York Times podcasts.

00:00:15 Speaker_07
And it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done.

00:00:29 Speaker_10
It was a March afternoon in Rutherford County, Tennessee, a growing community about 30 miles southeast of Nashville. School was out for the day, and a dozen or so little kids were playing a game of pick-up basketball in someone's backyard.

00:00:43 Speaker_10
And then, as kids do, one said something about another kid's mom. This insult led to some shoving. And then, as kids also do, one of them pulled out a cell phone and started filming.

00:00:57 Speaker_10
There's some kind of heavy neon filter over the whole video, so it's hard to make out any faces. But here's what you can see.

00:01:04 Speaker_10
An eight-year-old boy, hands shoved into the pockets of his oversized parka, is trying to walk away from everyone when a smaller boy, about five or six, runs up behind him and smacks him in the back a few times.

00:01:16 Speaker_10
Then another little kid runs up and takes his turn, throws a couple feeble punches to the back of the kid walking away. Some of the older boys are egging them on. Meantime, off camera, you can hear one girl try to break it up.

00:01:36 Speaker_10
Other kids just stand around, watching. And a few of them are also filming on their phones. And then the video just ends. It's the type of fight that barely seems worth posting online. But that happened anyway.

00:01:51 Speaker_10
And soon the video started to make the rounds, spreading from the kids, to teachers, and eventually, to one police officer. And it's what happened next, once this officer got involved, that the story really begins.

00:02:05 Speaker_10
Because it's what caught everyone's attention to what's been happening to kids in Rutherford County. It's what caught mine. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Maribyn Knight. This is The Kids of Rutherford County.

00:02:19 Speaker_10
Episode 1, The Egregious Video. A few weeks after the fight, Alexia Martin got a call from a police officer named Crystal Templeton.

00:02:59 Speaker_08
She said that my kids was on the video instigating the fight. She was like it was bullying and she would like to talk to them and that they wouldn't be in no type of trouble. So I made plans to meet Mrs. Templeton.

00:03:17 Speaker_10
Later that day, Alexia and her 10-year-old daughter, Imarie, drove to meet Officer Templeton on a side street.

00:03:25 Speaker_08
So when I got there, Ms. Templeton shows me the video. And I was like, well, that's not my kids. That's bullying. And she was like, well, you know, I want to talk to the other kids and let them know what they're doing is not right. No one is in trouble.

00:03:42 Speaker_08
I was like, well, OK. She said, so can you identify your kids? I said, yes, I can. I said, that's my daughter is the one who's saying stop to Tay-Tay. That's my son over there. He's in the video, but he wasn't saying nothing, instigating nothing.

00:04:03 Speaker_08
She said, so who are the rest of the other kids? So my daughter, she wrote down all the kids' names, and we gave them to her.

00:04:13 Speaker_10
The whole thing seemed very casual. Alexia doesn't remember Officer Templeton even telling her that she was conducting an investigation.

00:04:21 Speaker_10
So when Imarie, Alexia's daughter, leaned over the hood of the police car and wrote down the names of the kids in the video, she had no idea that what she was doing would lead to 11 kids, including herself, getting arrested.

00:04:46 Speaker_10
The reason why Officer Templeton was trying to ID all the kids in the video is because she believed all of them bore some responsibility for the fight, or at least for not stopping it.

00:04:56 Speaker_10
The two kids doing the actual hitting, she thought they were probably too young to bring charges against. They looked like they were about five or six years old. And in Rutherford County, they generally didn't charge kids under seven.

00:05:08 Speaker_10
But what about the other kids? The kids standing around? The kids egging it on? Officer Templeton wondered if there was a charge that would apply to all of them.

00:05:19 Speaker_10
So, relying on the memory of a 10-year-old, Officer Templeton took the list of names given to her by Imarie and headed to the county's Judicial Commissioner's office for guidance on what to charge them all with.

00:05:33 Speaker_10
In Rutherford County, Judicial Commissioners are the people who approve charges. At their office, the commissioners searched the state's database and they found a statute that seemed to fit the bill, criminal responsibility for conduct of another.

00:05:48 Speaker_10
Officer Templeton would later say, quote, I looked at the charge to the best of my ability from my experience was like, yeah, that's the charge. The judicial commissioner signed off. Petitions were secured. Word went out. Arrest these kids.

00:06:10 Speaker_10
As would later be documented in over a dozen interviews with internal affairs investigators, the arrests did not go smoothly.

00:06:17 Speaker_02
Well, we'll go ahead and start with May 27th, 2016. It is 11 a.m. Sergeant Craig Snyder, Office of Professional Responsibility.

00:06:28 Speaker_10
In an office at the local police department, Tammy Garrett, the principal at a school called Hobgood Elementary, sat down with two of those investigators.

00:06:37 Speaker_02
When did you become aware of the arrests that were going to take place at Hopgood, at your school?

00:06:45 Speaker_11
The investigation or the arrests?

00:06:46 Speaker_02
Well, the investigation.

00:06:50 Speaker_10
Principal Garrett told the investigators that Officer Templeton had shown her the video of the fight on a Wednesday. And by Friday morning, Templeton called to say the police were coming to Hopgood to arrest some girls who were in the video.

00:07:03 Speaker_10
But right away, Principal Garrett was concerned, partly because the kids Templeton named. Well, Garrett hadn't seen all of them in the video.

00:07:12 Speaker_11
There were kids that I knew that I didn't see in there that are good kids at school that I started thinking, you know, what's going on? I didn't see any of those kids. Did she mention how she had identified those kids?

00:07:28 Speaker_11
She had talked to some kids and the parents, is what she said. And so I thought, well, she's investigating, not me. Maybe there's things I didn't know.

00:07:38 Speaker_10
Still, Principal Garrett was worried. It was her fourth year as principal at Hopkidd Elementary, and she'd spent those years working hard to build trust with parents and the kids at her school.

00:07:49 Speaker_10
She thought it certainly wouldn't help that relationship if she was allowing police to come to the school and arrest kids. But she believed she didn't have a choice in the matter.

00:08:00 Speaker_10
Principal Garrett said Officer Templeton assured her the arrests wouldn't be disruptive.

00:08:05 Speaker_11
She said, I want to promise y'all that they weren't going to be handcuffed and that I'll be there. I'm going to take care of this. It'll be discreet.

00:08:15 Speaker_10
Garrett told Templeton her preference was that the girls be arrested before school let out. She didn't want a bunch of students in the hallways or the yard or in the bus lines seeing their classmates get taken out by police officers.

00:08:29 Speaker_10
But as the day wore on, getting closer to school dismissal at 2.30, Officer Templeton still hadn't shown up at Hopgood. Instead, three different police officers came. And that's when things got confusing.

00:08:43 Speaker_10
Crowded into the assistant principal's office, discussing what to do next, Garrett said one officer in a tactical vest was telling her, go get the kids. But a second officer was telling her, don't go get the kids.

00:08:57 Speaker_10
That officer seemed to be having second thoughts about the whole thing.

00:09:01 Speaker_11
So he kept telling me, hey, this is not right. I don't think this is right.

00:09:05 Speaker_02
Was he specific with anything?

00:09:08 Speaker_11
He said, this is going to blow up. This is going to blow up. You shouldn't do this. This is not right.

00:09:14 Speaker_02
Meaning the arrest?

00:09:15 Speaker_11
Uh-huh. And I don't know what to do.

00:09:21 Speaker_10
The officer telling Principal Garrett not to go get the kids was Chris Williams. In his internal affairs interview, Officer Williams said when he learned what these arrests were about, he was shocked.

00:09:33 Speaker_04
It was like, what in the world?

00:09:36 Speaker_10
He was like, what in the world? Because he'd seen the video of the fight the night before, after Officer Templeton had asked him to check it out. And he remembered when he watched it.

00:09:45 Speaker_04
I was like, that's the egregious video that you were talking about? And she was like, yeah. And I'm like, well, if you follow any group of kids that get off the bus home, this is what you're going to see. This is normal behavior for most kids.

00:10:05 Speaker_10
Then there was this. All the kids in the video were black, and most of the students at Hopgood were black or Latino.

00:10:13 Speaker_10
Williams, who's also black, said he didn't think Templeton, who's white, was intentionally going after these kids because of their race.

00:10:21 Speaker_10
But he also said he couldn't help but wonder if something like this would happen at a school that was mostly white.

00:10:29 Speaker_10
Back in the assistant principal's office, Williams started calling up the chain of command, if not to stop the arrests, at least to slow things down while they got some clarity on the situation.

00:10:40 Speaker_04
And I'm trying to call someone to, I don't want to say use common sense, but at least think about what we're doing.

00:10:50 Speaker_10
The first person Williams talked to was his sergeant, who told him to go forward with the arrests. He then called others to try to get a different answer. He called a lieutenant, who didn't pick up.

00:11:01 Speaker_10
Then he got through to a major, who essentially told him to just figure it out. Meanwhile, the officer in the room telling Garrett to, yes, go get the kids, was Officer Jeff Carroll, and he was making his own phone calls.

00:11:16 Speaker_10
Carroll was a patrol officer and a SWAT team member. He declined my interview requests, but in his internal affairs interview, he said, while, quote, nobody likes to arrest kids at school, he had his orders.

00:11:29 Speaker_03
I have one. Our sergeant tells me to do something as long as I know it's not illegal, or in my eyes, I'm going to do it.

00:11:43 Speaker_02
So who finally said, go get the kids?

00:11:46 Speaker_11
Carol.

00:11:48 Speaker_02
What made you listen to Carol at that point? You said they were saying, don't and do, don't and do.

00:11:53 Speaker_11
Because he was probably the more aggressive one. So I went to get them.

00:11:58 Speaker_10
Principal Garrett got three girls from their classrooms, an 11-year-old, a 10-year-old, and an 8-year-old.

00:12:05 Speaker_11
As I came up, you know, with the hall with the girls, I was kind of trying to prepare them. I said, hey guys, the police are here. Regarding the video, you're going to have to come to the office with me.

00:12:15 Speaker_11
Well, the oldest one was telling me, hey, these other two weren't even there. You know, for me seeing the video, I didn't see them in the video. So I thought maybe she had a pretty legitimate claim. I don't know if that's right.

00:12:29 Speaker_02
You said this was in the hallway?

00:12:31 Speaker_11
Yeah, as we were walking down the hall. She was like, Dr. G, they weren't even there. They weren't even there.

00:12:38 Speaker_10
One of the girls even had an alibi. She'd been at a pizza party with her basketball team the day of the fight. As Garrett walked the girls into the office, she turned to the cops and said,

00:12:49 Speaker_11
These two weren't even there. And then Officer Carroll got very aggressive with me, and he was like right here in my face, and he pulled out the cuffs, and he said, we're going now, we're going now. There's no more talking, we're going now.

00:13:04 Speaker_11
And I said, but, but, but, you know, they said they weren't even there. And he said three times, really loud, and he had the handcuffs right in my face, and he was screaming at me. But I was scared. And I didn't want to go to jail, and so I backed off.

00:13:24 Speaker_11
But I was crying, and the kids were crying, and they were screaming and reaching for me, and it was awful.

00:13:34 Speaker_10
The other officers in the room don't recall screaming or yelling, or Officer Carroll being particularly aggressive. But they do confirm kids were crying, and emotions were running high.

00:13:45 Speaker_10
Principal Garrett then told the police that one of the little girls had diabetes and got treatment when she got home from school.

00:13:53 Speaker_10
Carroll got on the phone with the sergeant, who told him that the girl could sit tight in the nurse's office for now, but the other two girls needed to be arrested. Officer Carroll then turned to those two girls. I told him, honey, something's come up.

00:14:08 Speaker_03
We have to take y'all down to the juvenile detention center, but don't worry, your mom and dad's gonna be able to pick you up as soon as we get down there." Of course, they started crying.

00:14:21 Speaker_10
The juvenile detention center. Jail, basically. One of the largest in the state. A two-tiered jail with dozens of surveillance cameras, 48 cells, and 64 beds.

00:14:33 Speaker_10
In contrary to what Officer Carroll suggested to the girls, kids who get arrested don't always get picked up by their mom and dad as soon as they get there.

00:14:42 Speaker_10
Instead, according to the standard procedure, they can be booked, meaning jail staff record their names and birthdates, do a 16-point search, and then place them in a holding area.

00:14:55 Speaker_10
Inside the school office, Officer Carroll handcuffed the 11-year-old, and she dropped to her knees.

00:15:01 Speaker_10
A third officer handcuffed the 8-year-old, though once they got to the parking lot, he took the handcuffs off because he later said, he quote, didn't really think she was a risk or anything.

00:15:12 Speaker_10
Back in the office, Principal Garrett suddenly realized she forgot to get the last girl on Templeton's list.

00:15:19 Speaker_11
You know, because when I came in with those other three and it went crazy, With the yelling and stuff, I realized I never went and got the kid that was in the bus.

00:15:30 Speaker_10
The kid on the bus was 10-year-old Imarie. Not only was she the one who wrote down the names for Officer Templeton just the day before, but she was also the one in the video saying, stop, stop, Tay-Tay. And yet Garrett was still being told to get her.

00:15:46 Speaker_11
So I said, she's on the bus by now. They said, go get her. So I had already, at that time, the man had already yelled at me. I was already crying. And they made me go out there crying in front of all my bus students and get her off the bus.

00:16:03 Speaker_05
So I was on my way home. You know, I had just got out of school, on my way home. This is Imarie. But Ms. Garrett, she came to get me, and she had tears in her eyes. And when she whispered in my ear, talking about the police,

00:16:15 Speaker_05
That's when I broke down and that's when I shut everything out. I was scared. I didn't know what was going to happen. I was scared to go to jail. It was just a lot and I was just trying to figure out what's going on. Why is this happening?

00:16:28 Speaker_05
What am I getting picked up for?

00:16:31 Speaker_08
So my sister called me and told me I needed to get to the school because they was trying to take my daughter to the detention. And I said, OK, I'm on my way. This, again, is Alexia, Imarie's mom. When I got there, it was some police officers there.

00:16:52 Speaker_08
They had my daughter. She was crying, upset, throwing up everywhere. And the police officers told me that they had to take them downtown. They had to take her to the juvenile detention. I was like, you got to take a juvenile detention.

00:17:08 Speaker_08
They haven't done nothing. And they was like, well, this is out of our hands. You know, you got kids crying and don't want to go to the detention, don't know what they're going to the detention. And you got to hand your kids over to some strangers.

00:17:31 Speaker_10
In total, 11 kids from across the county were brought to the juvenile detention center over that video. One of them by mistake, so she was released immediately. But the other 10 kids were processed.

00:17:44 Speaker_10
When Imarie was taken to the detention center, jail staff recorded her name and birthdate, searched her, confiscated her jewelry, all her small rings, and then placed her in a holding area.

00:17:58 Speaker_05
I just remember being in her code and hearing the sound of the buzzers go off and the doors open and shutting and I was scared.

00:18:10 Speaker_10
Imarie and five others got to go home the day they were arrested. But four boys, two 10-year-olds, an 11-year-old, and a 12-year-old, they were kept in jail overnight. Two of them were held all weekend.

00:18:23 Speaker_10
One of the boys told me about how he was forced to shower in front of a guard and then given a jumpsuit and put in a cell alone, which was all standard procedure for kids put in detention in Rutherford County.

00:18:35 Speaker_10
During waking hours, the kids aren't allowed to sleep.

00:18:38 Speaker_10
I spoke to many people who told me that if they did fall asleep or if they were caught lying down, the guard would bang on the cell door to wake them up or force them to stand in the corner of their cell for long periods of time.

00:18:50 Speaker_10
10, 11, 12-year-olds are kids who play freestag at recess. They still snuggle on the couch with their parents and hold their hands when they get scared. In other words, these were kids.

00:19:06 Speaker_10
More about what happened once the rest of the county, and the world, got wind of the arrests, after the break. By the time the last kid was booked into the juvenile detention center, the news about the arrests had gotten out.

00:19:27 Speaker_10
A bunch of little kids arrested, some at school, with handcuffs? People were pissed.

00:19:35 Speaker_00
Outrageous spreading through one Tennessee community after five children were holed up.

00:19:40 Speaker_09
One hundred parents met at First Baptist Church in Murfreesboro over the weekend demanding answers.

00:19:45 Speaker_01
It was injustice to these kids and just to the family. I just I'm angry.

00:19:52 Speaker_10
The shock spread beyond just Rutherford County. Stories about the arrests appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Mail.

00:20:01 Speaker_10
Fueling the outrage, it turned out that the charge brought against the kids, criminal responsibility for conduct of another, It's not actually a charge.

00:20:11 Speaker_10
It's a little technical, but criminal responsibility is a legal theory, one that was misunderstood by both Officer Templeton, who launched the investigation, and the judicial commissioners who approved the charges.

00:20:23 Speaker_10
The cases against the kids were later all dismissed. Soon after the arrests, the chief of police called for a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of what happened.

00:20:35 Speaker_10
Of the 20 people interviewed, investigators spent the most time with Officer Templeton.

00:20:46 Speaker_02
So what we'll do is I'll first start with having you start at the beginning, wherever you think the beginning's at.

00:20:51 Speaker_06
Okay. Well, as my report says, on 4-13 at approximately 10 o'clock, a teacher showed me a video

00:21:01 Speaker_10
Officer Templeton declined to speak with me, but she spoke to internal affairs investigators for almost seven hours. And in those interviews, she talked about what she saw when she first watched the video of the fight.

00:21:13 Speaker_06
You know, the group's pushing these two little kids to assault this other child. It was the whole group, and they're basically all doing the same thing. At some point, someone could have went and got an adult,

00:21:28 Speaker_06
I'm not saying jump in and physically stop the fight, but they could have went and got an adult, but no one did anything.

00:21:36 Speaker_02
So you felt obligated to try and arrest as many of those kids as possible?

00:21:41 Speaker_06
I did not feel obligated at that point to arrest anyone. I felt obligated to investigate it if the detective division wasn't going to. Okay.

00:21:51 Speaker_10
For much of this interview, the tone of Craig Snyder, the lead investigator, is what I describe as perplexed over how arrests this unusual could happen in the first place.

00:22:01 Speaker_10
But to Officer Templeton, she seems to think the arrests were all pretty straightforward. In her view, she was just doing her job.

00:22:09 Speaker_06
There's an assault here. There's a victim here. Juvenile court is about rehabilitation. And I felt like I needed to do something to help these kids. If I can get them in front of the judge, maybe she can put some services in the home.

00:22:26 Speaker_06
I don't know, whatever. It's about rehabilitation.

00:22:31 Speaker_02
Did anybody at any point, did anybody at any point, any supervisor, did any of them at any point tell you, no, you're not going to do this?

00:22:42 Speaker_06
No. No one ever said no. No one ever said, you know, No one ever said to me that. They knew why I was doing what I was doing. So, if somebody told me no, stop, I would have stopped.

00:23:09 Speaker_03
So you wouldn't change the way you did any of this?

00:23:12 Speaker_06
Having the knowledge that I have today, knowing that all of this has turned into this, yes, I would.

00:23:20 Speaker_10
And by this, I assume Officer Templeton is referring to many things, the public relations disaster that had played out on the local news, the fact that it turns out the kids were arrested on a charge that doesn't even exist, and that she's probably definitely getting in trouble for this entire fiasco, which she later did, a three-day suspension.

00:23:40 Speaker_06
But even still, Templeton tells the investigators, if we reverse taking away all of the knowledge that I've learned the last six weeks, no. I would do it the same way I did it.

00:23:57 Speaker_10
This is one of the most striking things I came across in my reporting. The difference in perception between those on the outside of this juvenile system and those on the inside.

00:24:08 Speaker_10
To the general public, arresting a bunch of children and throwing them in jail for watching a fight seemed, among other things, way out of line. But to many insiders, like Officer Templeton or the sergeant who backed her up, the arrest made sense.

00:24:25 Speaker_10
Same for the judicial commissioners, even the juvenile judge. Her response to the arrests was, quote, we are in a crisis with our children in Rutherford County. I've never seen it this bad.

00:24:41 Speaker_10
It's hard to change a system when the insiders running that system don't see a problem with it. But there definitely was a problem.

00:24:49 Speaker_10
In the years leading up to the arrests at Hopkid Elementary, Rutherford County's own data showed that it was jailing a staggering number of kids. The county had been warned about it, actually.

00:25:01 Speaker_10
Years before, a consultant had told county officials that they were jailing kids at more than three times the state average. Still, nothing changed. In fact, the numbers just kept going up.

00:25:16 Speaker_10
which meant for the kids of Rutherford County, getting sent to juvenile detention was almost a rite of passage, a normal part of childhood. In many cases, what it also was, was illegal.

00:25:32 Speaker_10
This is a story of how that system came to be, how it came to be built, and how it came to be accepted, lauded even.

00:25:41 Speaker_10
It's also the story of the two insiders, former juvenile delinquents themselves, who actually did see the problem in Rutherford County, what it was doing to kids. They just needed other people to see it too.

00:25:58 Speaker_10
That's next time on The Kids of Rutherford County. The Kids of Rutherford County is a co-production of Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.

00:26:21 Speaker_10
It was reported by me, Meribah Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong. The show is produced by Daniel Guimet, with additional production by Michelle Navarro.

00:26:34 Speaker_10
Editing from Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra, along with Sarah Bluestain and Ken Armstrong at ProPublica, and my colleague Tony Gonzalez at Nashville Public Radio. Additional editing from Anita Batajo and Alex Kollowitz.

00:26:49 Speaker_10
The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Ende Chubu. Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan, with additional fact-checking by Naomi Sharp. Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

00:27:05 Speaker_10
The original score for our show is from The Blasting Company. Susan Wessling is our standards editor, and legal review from Dana Green, Alamin Sumar, and Simone Prokus. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon.

00:27:21 Speaker_10
Additional production from Janelle Pfeiffer. Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Sam Dolnik is the deputy managing editor of The New York Times.

00:27:32 Speaker_10
Special thanks to the folks at ProPublica, including Steven Engelberg, Charles Ornstein, Susan Carroll, Alex Meyer-Jeske, and Hannah Freskes. And at Nashville Public Radio, thanks to Emily Siner.

00:27:47 Speaker_10
The Kids of Rutherford County is produced by Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.