Texas Woman Arrested Over Facebook Post

A woman down in rural Texas was shocked when she opened her front door only to find the local police standing there ready to arrest her over a Facebook post. And the reason that she was shocked was because that particular post wasn't threatening anyone, nor was it calling for any sort of violence. Instead, she was simply commenting on the horrible quality of the water in the town's local water supply. Now one of our senior reporters here at the Epoch Times, she actually went down to where all this took place to get the full story. So strap yourselves in, smash those like and subscribe buttons, and let's dive right in. The woman's name is Jennifer Combs, and she's a local independent journalist living in Navarro County, Texas. And she runs a Facebook group called Southern Bell Watch. Now earlier this year, sometime in April, she began to hear reports of brown, murky, smelly water coming out of the local taps in a neighboring city called Trinidad, Texas. She then posted the following message on her Facebook group. We are receiving reports of possible water quality issues, including concerns about bacteria and unsafe conditions. We take these reports very seriously and are currently verifying the information. If your water is discolored, has sediment, odor, or if you or your family have experienced illness you believe may be related, please reach out. And remarkably, somebody did reach out. As I mentioned, the local police sent a deputy over to Jennifer's house to arrest her. She was then thrown in jail without bail for 23 hours. You see, what happened was that the local chief of police issued a felony arrest warrant against Jennifer, claiming that she violated a law which makes it illegal to knowingly initiate a false emergency. The local police chief even doubled down, saying that Jennifer broke the law by spreading false information and that it was a cut-and-dry case. That's what he wrote in a Facebook post following her arrest. He even arrested a local citizen who was protesting Jennifer's arrest outside the courthouse. However, the entire thing quickly fell apart. The charges were dropped when a grand jury declined to indict Jennifer based on the facts. The police chief and the municipal judge were so disgraced that they had to resign. And now, the city is facing a cavalcade of lawsuits, including one from Jennifer herself who is seeking both monetary damages as well as punitive damages against the city government. And I want to go through a few of the specific points in this case because it really demonstrates how corrupt things can get without transparency. And so, rewinding the clock, you have Jennifer make her Facebook post and then get arrested for inciting a panic. And then the following is what took place. A local citizen, Winston Knowles, known as Otto the Watchdog, was arrested for municipal disorderly conduct after protesting Combs' arrest outside City Hall with a sign containing an obscenity. And so, the guy protesting the arrest was himself arrested on a disorderly conduct charge because allegedly, the sign he was holding up had a profane word on it and the police claimed that the profanity offended somebody. Now, even though we're in America, you're already thinking that doesn't even make sense, but it gets even stranger when you consider the following. Quote, Colby Reyes, former city water clerk, was fired after she allegedly declined to file a complaint about being offended by Knowles at the behest of the police chief. Reyes refused, saying that she was not offended, meaning that the police justified arresting the protester by saying that this other woman in the city's water office was offended by his sign. But that was a lie. And when the woman refused to file an official complaint about being offended, she was fired by the city. But it gets even better. Quote, municipal judge Shalina Bivens dropped the disorderly conduct charge against Knowles, finding no evidence that the water clerk had been offended by his protest sign. Bivens was then fired by the city. All right, just to pause here for a super quick moment. If you've watched our program, Facts Matter, then you know that we focus on one thing, which is the facts. Not speculation, not narratives, just what the data shows. And right now, the data globally is pointing in a direction people should really be paying attention to, which is the fact that global conflicts are fueling market uncertainty. That's why I believe in owning something real, something physical, something that the government can't just inflate away, which is physical gold and physical silver from today's sponsor, which is American Hartford Gold, the company that I trust and who I've been personally buying from for many years now. These are tangible assets. 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You have a local independent journalist getting reports about something happening with a local water supply. She then puts out feelers to the local community on her Facebook group saying, hey, if you know any other stories about the local water, send them to me. I'll pass it along to the government. They can investigate. She gets arrested for inciting an emergency. Once she's arrested, another local journalist protests outside the courthouse holding up a sign. Then he gets arrested because allegedly someone is offended by that sign. However, the person offended, the water clerk, is not really offended. She refuses to file a complaint, gets fired, and then the judge drops the charges against the protester because nobody was really offended. And then the judge herself gets fired as well. It's like the plot of a bad movie. However, because all of this came to light, what actually wound up happening is that, for one, there was a wave of resignations, including the police chief, the city administrator, as well as the new water clerk resigned. And then the judge that was appointed after the other judge was fired, she also chose to resign. Then secondly, the Texas Rangers opened up an official investigation into the city of Trinidad, their local city government, to see all the corruption that was playing out behind the scenes, alleged corruption. And then thirdly, quite a few lawsuits have been lobbied against them. The main lawsuit comes from Ms. Jennifer Combs herself, the independent journalist who was arrested at her house. And here is the crux of that lawsuit. That those concerns were validated when the city of Trinidad issued a boil water notice in April after Combs wrote the Facebook post. And that last part is really the gravy on top to this whole story, because Jennifer made her Facebook post asking the local community to send her any anecdotes that she might have about the water so she can then turn that information over to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. And she was arrested for inciting panic, even though it later turned out that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had already received multiple complaints about Trinidad's brown drinking water and opened their own investigation into the matter before her Facebook post was even published. And shortly thereafter, they even issued a boil notice. These facts, they led Jennifer's lawyer to say the following, quote, we have plenty of evidence that this was all a concerted effort to silence my client for uncovering and talking about the water problems there that they were trying to cover up. And then along that same vein, the lawsuit itself states the following, quote, rather than address the water quality crisis, defendants manufactured criminal charges against Mrs. Combs under a statute that on its plain face does not apply to her conduct. It has no application whatsoever to the act of a journalist sharing community safety information with the public through social media. Jennifer Combs's arrest was an act of deliberate political retaliation. And so this is where the case currently stands. The Texas Rangers are investigating the city government. Many resignations have already been tendered, and several of these lawsuits are currently working their way through the system. If you'd like to read Jennifer's story for yourself, it'll be found down in the description box below. And then if any interesting discovery comes out of this case or once the case is adjudicated, I will, if anything of genuine interest comes out, I'll pass it along to you in a follow up episode. Until then, if you would be so kind, please do smash those like and subscribe buttons so this video can reach ever more people so that the U.S. doesn't turn into some kind of a U.K. and analogous state where this type of stuff is more common. And that's that's the thing. When I was first reading the story, I'm like, is this in the U.K.? It can't be rural Texas that somebody is getting arrested for a Facebook post like that, especially like this. It's such a tepid post. It's not like she was calling for violence against the water clerk or anything. She was just saying, like, hey, pass along information. I'll pass it along to the government. It's pretty wild. But you'll never know. I mean, listen, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. So we'll have to see how the case actually gets adjudicated. So anyway, again, all the links will be down in the description box below. And then lastly, on a totally unrelated matter, if you are interested, as I'm sure almost everyone is, on what happens to people after they die, well, check out the new documentary film over on Epic TV called Final Hours. It's a really unique film because in it we interviewed quite a few people who died previously either they were clinically dead, meaning they had no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath, no brain activity, nothing. They're just clinically dead. Or they were brain dead, meaning they were in a coma. But regardless of which camp they fell into, they later woke up, they got resuscitated, and they remembered everything that they saw on the other side. And in the documentary, it's truly amazing how these different people from completely different walks of life who had no interaction before, they spoke of almost an agreement of very similar phenomena. The lights they saw, the heavenly realms they were able to visit, the heavenly beings they were able to communicate with, being able to see their life from outside the constraints of time and space. One young man was even talking about how he was able to see the entirety of his life through the eyes of other people, through the people that he was either hurting or through the people who loved him. They talked about the unconditional love that they felt radiating throughout the entire universe. And again, the most fascinating thing was that if one person said that, you can say, okay, well, maybe they made it up, maybe it was a hallucination or something like that. But you have, in the documentary, you have a lot of people, but you have thousands of tens of thousands of these experiences, even outside the documentary. And they're so similar that they're leading to a true, I guess, a new understanding of what life is and what death is in this new kind of growing field of, I guess you would either call it near death experiences or post death experiences, it's kind of a new growing scientific field. And the documentary really does a great job of patching these stories together and sort of just looking at the facts, not trying to paint one narrative or another, but really just speaking to the people who've seen the other side for themselves, came back and were able to tell their stories. It's a fascinating documentary and the people who have watched it and left comments, some of them said, quite a few of them said that it changed the way they thought about life and viewed life and thought about what life actually is. So if you want to check it out, the link to it will be right there at the top of the description box below. Check it out. It's called Final Hours. It's a great documentary film and you can watch it today by clicking on that link and I hope that you do. Technically, I was dead, but I felt that this was more real than real and I felt more alive than life itself. Thousands have glimpsed something vast and loving waiting on the other side. I was surrounded by beings, some of them I recognize from this life. It's more just like a light, the light of God. I was so happy. I just felt like more and more of the pain of this world was just floating away. What do these human experiences mean for our collective soul? The more we can come into harmony, love, and kindness, the more we're aligned with the essence of the universe. Until next time, I'm your host Roman from The Epic Times. Stay informed and most importantly, stay free.