Black Men Arrested for Escorting White Teen

By Christina Ng, ABCnews.com

Landry Thompson with dance instructor Emmanuel Hurd and dance partner Josiah Kelly

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. ( . . .)

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. ( . . .)

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.” ( . . .)

“[Hurd] is somebody we know well,” she said. “His wife and kids spent the night at my house last night. These are not people that we kind of know. These are close family friends that we trust explicitly with our children. They just happen to be black.”

Hurd said he begged officers from the back of the police car to listen to him. He said one officer said to him, “Sir, you’ve got to understand, you two men are black and she’s white.” (. . .)

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