The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
She said the agents didn’t care.
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
Before they left, Marisa said one of the agents made a comment.
“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”
Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.
Marisa said she is left with nothing but questions.
In the military we referred to this as PILLAGING. It's illegal for US soldiers to do it to foreign nationals in Iraq and Afghanistan and if they get caught they get court-martialed. I guess if you work for Trump and you do it to Americans, it's okay though.
The term used for it in law enforcement is "civil asset forfeiture". For her to get it back, her property is going to have to get a lawyer to defend that it is probably not used in a crime or purchased with funds obtained through criminal activity. Doing that is not cheap.
If anyone thinks Schadrach is being a troll, they're not. CAF is really fucked up when you look into its use and what it takes to get it back.
Yeah, wasn't trolling. They literally start a court case against the property to determine if that property was used in or purchased through the proceeds of a crime, and the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. Hiring a lawyer to defend your property against the allegation it was bought with drug money or w/e often costs more than replacing it would. Which is the point.