photo by: Contributed

A photo taken from a police report of two pre-rolled joints, edibles and a marijuana pipe that were seized by a Brown County sheriff's deputy on May 24, 2024, after a traffic stop for speeding.

When two teachers from Kansas were traveling to see a friend in Nebraska for Memorial Day, they didn’t remotely imagine that the road trip would end in a strip search, an impounded vehicle and thousands of dollars in legal fees, but that’s what happened after they were pulled over for speeding in Brown County and a deputy found a small amount of a marijuana product in the vehicle.

A Lawrence woman, Amanda Brubaker, 46, told the Journal-World that the experience left her traumatized and feeling like she should warn motorists going through northeast Kansas: “Don’t be Brown in Brown County.”

“The sheriff (deputy) was mad at us,” Brubaker said. “It was the most horrifying experience.” Brubaker claims the items that were found contained legal CBD, or cannabidiol, not THC, which is the psychoactive constituent of marijuana.

The sheriff of Brown County, John Merchant, did not make the traffic stop but generally defended it to the Journal-World, while the county attorney, Kevin Hill, said that he was looking into the incident and that the women’s experience could have been avoided if the county had adopted his preferred policy. He said he has asked law enforcement there to issue citations for small amounts of marijuana but that his request has been rejected.

photo by: Brown County Sheriff’s Office

Brown County Sheriff John Merchant

Merchant declined to go into details about Brubaker’s specific arrest or to comment on whether the arresting deputy, whom the Journal-World has also contacted, has ever been accused of misconduct or racial bias.

Brubaker, who is Black, said she is an English teacher at an all-Black school in the Kansas City area, and her friend, who is white and was driving, is a teacher from Wichita. The friend chose not to be part of this story out of concern for her job, but Brubaker said the story needed to be shared.

As the women were traveling past Hiawatha around 2 p.m. May 24 in Brown County, about 80 miles north of Lawrence, they saw in the rear-view mirror that a deputy was pulling them over. The deputy had clocked the women’s vehicle traveling 77 mph in a 65 mph zone, according to the deputy’s report.

However, the deputy, Sgt. Trevor Fee, never issued a speeding ticket to the driver. Fee instead insisted that the car smelled like marijuana and ordered them to get out, Brubaker said. The women denied that the car smelled like marijuana but said that it might have smelled like a hair product commonly used by Black women and like lunch.

“We smelled like hair grease and Burrito King,” Brubaker said.

According to Brubaker, Fee then began yelling at the women to exit the car and said that he planned to search the vehicle. Brubaker said that she and the driver were so caught off guard by the deputy’s angry demeanor that they didn’t resist and were not asked if they consented to a search. She said that she thought if she said anything the deputy might arrest her for interference. Neither woman has any previous criminal history, Brubaker said.

“I didn’t know if I could consent. He was yelling at our faces,” Brubaker said.

Hill, the county attorney, said he is unaware of any accusations of misconduct against the deputy involved in the arrest but that he would review body camera footage from the arrest to determine if Fee engaged in misconduct and if any action should be taken.

The deputy went through the women’s luggage and found in the driver’s suitcase edibles and two pre-rolled cigarettes. Brubaker said the driver purchased those items legally in Wichita and that they were CBD products. The deputy also found a marijuana pipe in Brubaker’s suitcase.

That’s when Fee said, “Turn around, you’re going to jail,” Brubaker said. Fee then took both women to jail. Brubaker said that the deputy never accused them of driving under the influence or gave them a sobriety test but took them into custody on suspicion of nonviolent misdemeanor charges; each woman was later charged with one count each of possession of marijuana and possession of paraphernalia.

Sheriff Merchant said that when he took office his constituents had expressed a desire for a zero-tolerance drug policy in the county.

“It concerns me that certain areas in Kansas have chosen not to enforce these laws as it creates confusion within the public as to what is and is not unlawful, and may also cause some in the public to believe that law enforcement are picking and choosing which laws to enforce,” Merchant told the Journal-World.

He said that while marijuana may have a reputation for being harmless or nonaddictive, his experience in the community has been that people’s lives are negatively impacted by the drug.

For Brubaker, the “negative impacts” were about to go from bad to worse. She said that at the jail she and her friend were strip searched, poked and prodded, and then made to change into jail clothes because the deputy had assured them that they would be spending the holiday weekend in jail.

“I took my clothes off when I was told. It was terrible. Like being kidnapped,” Brubaker said.

Brubaker said that she asked one of the jail employees why she wouldn’t be allowed to bond out and the man told her that “if” the judge answers the phone on a Friday afternoon, the judge is generally not inclined to grant a bond without first seeing the defendant.

After the women were in custody for about three hours, a jail employee expressed “surprise” to the women when the judge let them be released on a $2,500 own-recognizance bond each, meaning that they were not required to pay any money to be released from jail but could be charged that amount if they fail to appear in court.

But now, the two women were stranded on a Friday afternoon on a holiday weekend 80 miles from Lawrence. Brubaker said that the deputy had the driver’s car towed, and when they reached the tow service on the phone the company said the soonest the car would be released was the following Tuesday.

“(The tow truck driver) said that it was a holiday weekend and he was playing poker with some friends,” Brubaker said.

The two women pooled their cash and promised the tow truck driver $350. Brubaker said she hoped the cash offer would be enough to get him to retrieve the car, and it was.

Brubaker said she asked her friend to take her home instead of driving onward to Nebraska. She said the experience was traumatic and she vowed never to travel through that part of Kansas again. She also said the experience has soured her view of law enforcement in general.

“I am Black and have always wanted a good experience with law enforcement, but I just haven’t (had one),” Brubaker said.

Brubaker said that she was appointed an attorney but that she has little confidence in the man because he is “too old” and won’t participate in video conference hearings, meaning that she has to drive there and appear in person. She said her friend has spent a few thousand dollars to retain an attorney.

Brubaker’s attorney has already told her to apply for diversion, she said. At her first court appearance on July 5, her attorney, when asked how Brubaker would plead to the marijuana charge, accidentally said “no contest” and the court had to correct him to say “not guilty,” she said.

According to the Brown County website, costs and fees for marijuana diversion are $300 to apply, $158 for court, $45 for being arrested, $150 for a drug evaluation and a $400 KBI lab fee, for a total of $1,053. That cost does not include attorney fees.

Hill said that his office charges only $300 for applying for diversion while the remaining $700-plus in fees and fines goes to other government entities. He said the county tried to omit the $400 KBI fee for drug testing in some cases but the state has since forced the county to comply. He said defendants can avoid the fee by waiving the testing if there is no doubt what the substance is. Merchant said that the sheriff’s office receives no money from the county’s diversion program.

Brubaker is hopeful that KBI tests find that none of the items found in the car contain an illegal amount of THC, but she doesn’t expect to find that out for months. In the meantime she’s feeling pressure to take the diversion, and at some point she has to talk to her employer in Missouri to find out how the charges might affect her job.

She hopes that her job isn’t in jeopardy even if she is convicted since recreational marijuana is legal in Missouri. She has no plans to accept a conviction without a fight. She wants her children to know she did nothing wrong.

“If I don’t fight it, it costs me more with my kids, for them to have to see our rights violated,” Brubaker said.

She said she started using marijuana products during the pandemic after her children encouraged her to.

“I was losing my marbles,” Brubaker said.

She said that in both communities where she and her friend live — Lawrence and Wichita — small amounts of marijuana (around an ounce) have essentially been decriminalized and generally result in a citation and, in Lawrence, a $1 fine, if anything at all.

The trauma of two school teachers being treated like violent criminals continues to keep her awake some nights, she said.

“I’m not sure if this is a race thing or a marijuana thing, but let this story be a warning to Brown people who might be traveling through,” Brubaker said.

Hill, the county attorney, said that the decision to make warrantless arrests for misdemeanor marijuana did not come from his office. He said that he made the request in 2022 to law enforcement in the county to begin issuing citations. He said that with the absence of a more serious crime, he would prefer citations vs. arrests.

“With recreational marijuana legal in Missouri and Colorado, and medical marijuana legal in Oklahoma, I have asked law enforcement in Brown County to issue citations for cases involving small amounts of marijuana,” Hill said.

He said his intended policy came about after the change in Missouri law coupled with the U.S. House of Representatives having passed a bill to decriminalize marijuana. He said while the bill failed to make it past the Senate, he thought it was clear which direction the federal government was headed in coming years.

“It demonstrated a shift in policy towards focusing drug enforcement and resources on more serious drugs such as methamphetamine, opioids, etc.,” Hill said.

By focusing on harder drugs and violent crimes, the county’s resources would not be tied up on smaller matters, he said. Even the time and energy spent for officers to book someone into jail would be better used on more productive tasks, he said.

After Hill’s request, though, the sheriff declined to formalize the policy and sent an email to his deputies saying that if a deputy was considering issuance of a citation, the deputy should “get with [him] first for input,” Hill said.

“The result being that despite my request for citations for small amounts of marijuana where no other charges were present, those cases involving a joint or small amounts of marijuana would still result in a warrantless arrest unless input from the sheriff resulted in approval of a citation,” Hill said.

Merchant said that he is taking cues from the community, and unless state laws change, that will continue.

“I’ve interviewed many of those who have been arrested for marijuana usage or possession and most have told me that they feel it is a very addictive substance and hard to quit without help and support,” Merchant said.

Merchant said that an additional concern was that the highly addictive and often fatal drug fentanyl had been showing up in marijuana in his community.

“One individual shared with me that a family member was using marijuana in excess and ended up hospitalized in intensive care after using marijuana that had been laced with fentanyl,” Merchant said.