Buncombe law enforcement will reimburse driver for lost food in which field tests erroneously detected cocaine.
Posted: May 13, 2011 Filed under: Buncombe County, Immigration Leave a commentLooks like the BCS is starting to feel guilty, there is no way they’d be offering to pay for the food unless they were terrified of a law suit
From La Voz
Buncombe County Sheriff Van Duncan said his department has decided to reimburse a California carpet cleaner $400 for tamale and tortilla dough, shrimp and cheese in which three different preliminary tests erroneously detected the presence of cocaine.
“We are going to reimburse him for his food costs because it is the right thing to do,” Duncan said Thursday in a telephone interview with La Voz Independiente. “It was not Mr. Carranza’s fault that the test kits tested positive for cocaine. He said his items cost $400 and this seems fair and reasonable.”
However, Duncan said his department would not be responsible for the towing and impound fees for Antonio Hernández Carranza’s Ford Explorer or his five-month old dog found inside because they were “a direct result” of his decision not to pull over when deputies instructed him to do so.
“We try always to do the good and reasonable thing,” Duncan said. “We do not always do the good and reasonable thing and we say we are sorry when we need to.”
Hernández, 45, reached by telephone at his sister’s home in Johnson City, Tennessee, said he appreciated the gesture but that it was insufficient to cover all of his losses. Hernández said the SUV is now essentially unusable because of the odor left behind by the spoiled food.
“I have a lot of clothes that I also have lost because they smell so bad I will never get the smell out,” Hernández said in an interview conducted in Spanish.
The Mexican Consulate in Raleigh contacted Hernández, a native of Michoacan state in Mexico, on Wednesday, saying they may offer to help offset some of his losses and help him get back to California.
The sheriff said it was “unfortunate” that Hernández spent four days in jail while deputies waited for more thorough testing of the food by the State Bureau of Investigation, which invalidated the preliminary findings. But Duncan added he would have been criticized equally had Hernández bonded out of jail and the SBI confirmed the presence of cocaine after his release.
Duncan emphasized that his deputies’ decision to stop and arrest the Mexican national Sunday morning, May 1, had nothing to do with Hernández’s ethnicity, the original encounter with his deputy being so brief and the light of dawn so dim that the deputy, Patrick Vanderveen, only …
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