From A Follower: This post is being made as a cautionary tale and to shine some light on the negligence of the Commerce Police Department, the investigator, the DA and the judge.
I also want to make it clear we are not upset with the arresting officers, the Collin county Sheriffs department or the Collin county inmate page on Facebook. They were simply doing their job and reporting the news.
On July 21st Chris, myself and our 2 children (9 years old,and 9 months old) were driving home and we got pulled over. We gave the officers our licenses and figured at the most we would get a traffic citation. Well we were told that Chris had a warrant out for his arrest in Hunt county for theft of property, we were completely shocked because Chris hadn’t been in any sort of legal trouble for years. The officers informed us that the bond was preset at $1500 and we could immediately bail him out because he didn’t have to wait for a judge.
We get in touch with a bail bonds and found out we would have to pay $700 to bail him out due to him being a flight risk because of his line of work (interstate moving company) he was finally bailed out around 6:30am.
I called the Hunt county clerk to figure out what information they had on file, I discovered the warrant was placed for his arrest because he stole a tv from Walmart. Once again I was completely shocked because we have had the same tv in our home for the last 2 years. I then contacted the Hunt county sheriffs department to see if they had anything on file for him, they said they didn’t and referred me to the commerce police department.
I called CPD and asked what information they had on file for Christopher Youngman, I was placed on a brief hold and she came back and said “he was anonymously identified for stealing a tv out of Walmart on March 17th 2018” I asked for the description of the person who stole the tv and was told it was a white male wearing all black and a ball cap, I thanked her and hung up.
At this point I went to the commerce police department Facebook page and started searching for videos during that time frame. I ended up finding the video with the same time frame and matching the description I was given. I decided to look in the comments and saw where I had tagged Chris to look at the video.
That tag was seen as an Anonymous tip with out ANY SORT OF INVESTIGATION. No one contacted me or him to question us or confirm my comment, this is a small town and it’s not hard to figure out where we live. They FAILED to do an investigation and ended up setting out a warrant over a Facebook tag.
We got in touch with the DA who signed off on the warrant and we were told that they will be dropping the charges for insufficient evidence. They had absolutely no evidence to begin with because no investigation was done.
His mugshot was posted to the Collin county inmate page on Facebook, it was shared a few times and there were people calling him a thief, lair and a cry baby all because he was charged for a crime he did not commit.
Due to this unfortunate situation Chris almost lost his job and will now have to miss over a weeks work of pay due to missing his flight for being incarcerated for something he DID NOT DO AND THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE CLAIM HE DID, We will now be late on our rent and have to pay late fees all because the commerce police department failed to do to the job they are paid for with our tax dollars.
Please be careful in your wording when tagging people on Facebook as it is now apparently how we conduct proper investigations.
And to the commerce police department please do proper investigation in the future so this same situation doesn’t happen to other innocent people.
It would have taken a simple Facebook message or replying to the comment to conduct a proper investigation.
