In the Dark

For the past three years, Sarah Kleman’s workday as a paralegal downtown begins at 4 p.m. and sometimes doesn’t end until sunrise. But those late shifts have helped the single mother pay for college for her two daughters. Her eldest child received her education degree from the University of Texas last month. The youngest went from Lamar High School to Georgia State University, where she is a junior.

But Kleman’s daughters don’t want their mom working nights anymore — not after what’s happened to her.

On February 25 around 2:30 a.m., Houston police officer Daniel Matthews pulled Kleman over on her way home from work, just 50 feet away from her town house in a quiet residential area near Greenway Plaza.

Matthews ticketed her for a cracked taillight on her 1998 Nissan Altima. Then he ran a check on her license, and she waited for the results. A crowd of neighbors — as well as Kleman’s oldest daughter, who was back at home as a student teacher — gathered near the flashing lights as Matthews spoke with law enforcement on the radio.

An hour and a half after being stopped, Matthews took Kleman into custody. Her daughter, who had called her little sister in Georgia, said, “Oh, my God, Mom’s being arrested.”

The officer told Kleman she had two warrants out for her arrest, one in the county’s Precinct 6 and one in Precinct 7. “That’s impossible,” Kleman told him. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

“He said he’d gotten no response from Precinct 7,” says Kleman, “but that Precinct 6 had confirmed the warrant.”

The only thing Kleman could think of were two warrants for hot checks she’d paid off in 1992, during a difficult financial period following her divorce. But she’d received a speeding ticket a few years later and there were no arrest warrants appearing on her record then. She says Matthews wasn’t sure what the warrants were for. He told Kleman he’d seen only one false arrest in his 20 years on the force.

“You’re seeing another one right now,” said Kleman.

Soon, however, all Kleman saw was about 50 other prisoners inside a holding cell at the city’s Mykawa Jail. She asked again why she’d been jailed. No one could tell her.

Kleman tried to use a jail phone but says a female officer told her she couldn’t make a call until her name appeared on one of the lists that were periodically taped to a Plexiglas window there.

After several hours her name still never appeared on any list. Kleman protested that she hadn’t even been read her rights. Kleman says another guard just laughed at her and later told her, “You’re being transferred to Precinct 6 and you’re going to get your ass kicked over there.”

Around noon, after a few hours of sleep with a blanket on a concrete floor, Kleman was handed her jewelry and told to walk through a door where she’d be transferred to Precinct 6 in central Harris County.

That door led only to the jail lobby. She resisted the urge to run outside and instead asked the desk officer what she was supposed to do.

“Go home,” Kleman says she was told.

“But what was I in here for?”

“Just go home,” the officer said.

Instead, she went to the Precinct 6 offices to find out the reason for her arrest. Workers there told Kleman they didn’t know what she was talking about, that there were no charges against her. Later, the deputy constable who had supposedly confirmed the warrant denied authorizing it. “He told me, ‘It was a quiet night, no arrests,’ ” says Kleman.

Then it was on to Precinct 7. Constable Michael Butler told her they’d had a warrant but it was a mistake and was recalled — nobody from his precinct had authorized her arrest.

With the county denying responsibility, Kleman returned to the city for explanations. HPD spokesperson Robert Hurst concedes that there was “some confusion” but says the county warrants stemmed from the hot checks — the ones she’d paid off 12 years earlier. Hurst says Kleman’s situation is rare and that he’s never dealt with one like it.

Butler had told Kleman of his concerns about “communications between the precincts and police” and urged her to file a complaint with HPD’s Internal Affairs Division, she says. Kleman did — and the confusion only escalated.

On the day after her arrest, Kleman hand-delivered a typed complaint to HPD Internal Affairs Sergeant J.R. Gause. As Gause researched the arrest, Kleman says, she first told her there was no record of it, then said the warrant came from Precinct 7. Kleman explained what Butler himself had told her only hours earlier. Gause then called Precinct 7 and got in an argument with a precinct worker who hung up on the HPD officer. Gause called back to demand a supervisor, and Kleman says, she was soon witnessing a telephone fight between the two agencies over differing information on their computer screens.

When Kleman tried to sneak a peek at Gause’s screen, the officer got mad and told her to sit back down. Then Kleman says Gause told her she couldn’t accept the written complaint unless Kleman deleted the allegation that she hadn’t been read her rights. She says Gause told her she’d been watching too many cop shows on TV.

“I told her I work nights and don’t watch cop shows,” says Kleman. “She told me, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t work nights. You seem too scared to drive at night.’ “

Gause finally made a copy of Kleman’s complaint. “She brings back a copy and asks me to handwrite in it that I had a warrant in Precinct Six,” says Kleman. “I refused and told her, ‘I have to go to work. Are you going to accept this or not?’ “

“I’ve accepted it,” said Gause.

On March 4, Kleman faxed a letter to HPD to ensure that her complaint had been received. Gause replied the next day with a note that said an investigator would be contacting her “in the near future” regarding the matter.

Six weeks later, Kleman had yet to hear from any investigators. She signed up to tell her story at the City Council’s weekly public forum. The next day, Alan Baquet, manager of the office of the chief of police, called and Kleman told her story to him for nearly an hour.

“I started crying and he was very sympathetic,” says Kleman. Baquet told Kleman he’d have a status update on the investigation within a week and that his office would also be investigating. Kleman decided to wait on Baquet’s response before going to City Council.

Two weeks after that, Kleman still hadn’t been contacted by HPD, making her believe Baquet had tricked her. She again signed up to speak before City Council. Unknown to her, black activists had also scheduled time to demand a council vote on a resolution advocating reparations for descendants of slaves. Their demonstration turned council chambers into chaos, with dozens of police called in and some protesters forcibly removed.

Kleman left after the disruption, only to find a ticket on her car — the parking meter had expired. A later effort to address council failed when she was told that because she’d signed up to speak at the earlier session, she’d be at the bottom of the speakers list. Rather than risk missing more work time, Kleman decided she’d had her fill of City Hall.

Nearly four months after the arrest, Kleman seems no closer to solving the mystery of the phantom warrants. A representative of Justice of the Peace Richard Vara, whose court issues Precinct 6 warrants, insisted to the Houston Press that Kleman “could not have been arrested on anything out of our court. She’s not even in our computer.”

And a Precinct 7 deputy constable says their latest computer records now show it must have been Precinct 6 that wanted her arrested.

HPD spokesperson Hurst says that he can’t comment further because of the continuing internal affairs investigation, which he says can take up to 180 days.

“We look at every detail to the nth degree,” says Hurst. Requests were denied for interviews with Gause, Baquet and the head of internal affairs.

Hurst does dispute Kleman’s account of being denied calls during the eight hours she was jailed. “We encourage people to use the phone because we want them to make bail,” he says.

Kleman should file another complaint over that incident, Hurst says. “I don’t trust them and I’m not going to deal with them anymore,” Kleman said earlier this month. “It’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and get an attorney.”

Greg Gladden, an attorney and official with the American Civil Liberties Union, says Texas differs from most states in that police who arrest a person without a legitimate warrant are strictly liable for damages. “An officer has a responsibility to make sure the warrant is good,” he says. Gladden says the standard approach in cases where several agencies are pointing the blame at one another is to simply “sue them all and let them figure it out.” But he conceded such cases can be difficult to win.

For Kleman, the Kafkaesque ordeal has affected all of her family. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be arrested in front of your daughter? I’ve always tried to explain the world to my girls, but I can’t explain this.”