Dad and 7-year-old daughter held at gunpoint by out-of-control cop

Artist Ken Walton and his daughter Wren were driving a rental car in Arizona when they were stopped by an officer who thought he was driving a stolen car.

Late Friday night, Walton wrote, “Tonight, I was arrested at gunpoint by an Arizona highway patrol officer who threatened to shoot me in the back (twice) in front of my 7-year-old daughter. For a moment, I was certain he was going to kill me for no reason. I’m alive, and I need to share the story. PLEASE SHARE IT, because I have an important reason for staying up past 1AM to write it down.”

He went on to say that he and his daughter were making their way to the Grand Canyon in a rented Toyota Camry they’d picked up in Las Vegas.

“In Williams, Arizona, as I exited Interstate 40 to head north toward the Canyon rim, I was pulled over by an AHP officer who’d been tailing me for a couple of miles. I hadn’t been speeding, so I wondered if perhaps the car had a broken taillight or something. I rolled down my window and waited,” he said.

Instead of coming around to the driver’s side, however, the officer “rapped on the rear passenger side window with his pistol. My daughter, who was sitting inches from the barrel of his gun, jumped with fear as the officer yelled at me to roll down the front passenger window, his service weapon pointed directly at me.”

“My daughter rolled down her window and I explained that we were in a rental car, that we had no weapons, and I was having trouble figuring out how to roll down the front passenger window from my driver’s side door,” Walton reported.

However, the officer just kept shouting orders, ignoring the girl and becoming increasingly agitated.

“My daughter panicked and tried to get out of her booster seat to reach forward to roll down the front window, and the officer screamed her at her not to move as he pointed his pistol at her,” Walton wrote…

“Why was I arrested?,” he wrote. “The car I was had rented had previously had its front license plate lost or stolen, so the car rental company reported this to the Nevada DMV. The Arizona highway patrol officer, who looked up my plate number while he was tailing me, misinterpreted this Nevada DMV report as meaning that I was driving a car with a stolen license plate, and somehow this prompted him to approach me at gunpoint and threaten to kill me in front of my little girl.”

Walton said that he confronted the officer for overreacting and for threatening to kill him in front of his little girl.

“He stood by his story that I had made a threatening movement toward my waist, and I said it wasn’t true, and he said this wasn’t the place to discuss it. He let me go attend to my daughter but continued to ‘detain’ us for another 20 minutes as he talked to his supervisors, presumably plotting damage control.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.