(Reclaim The Net)—Jennifer Combs had never gotten so much as a speeding ticket. On May 8, police in Trinidad, Texas, arrested her on a state jail felony charge for writing a Facebook post about the town’s water supply.
The post said residents had been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. The city says that claim was false. So they sent cops to her door.
The charge is felony false alarm or report under Texas Penal Code § 42.06, a statute designed for people who call in fake bomb threats or fabricate emergencies. Trinidad’s police chief and local officials decided it also applies to a woman who ran a community Facebook page and relayed what neighbors told her about getting sick.
Combs’ post, published on her “Southern Belle Watch” account, read in part: “We have received reports that some citizens have been hospitalized due to bacteria in the water. This is a serious public health concern that deserves immediate attention. If your water looks discolored, contains sediment, has a strong odor, or you have experienced related health issues, please send us a message. We are gathering information and reporting findings to the state.”
That post got her a night in the Navarro County Justice Center. She has since filed a federal lawsuit alleging the arrest was “an act of deliberate political retaliation.”
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
The water is brown. The city admits it.
Trinidad, a small city in Henderson County about an hour southeast of Dallas, has a water problem that nobody disputes.
Combs described it as looking like “the Trinity River is flowing from their water taps.” The city’s mayor, Dennis Haws, told reporters the pipes date back to the 1950s. “We have to get to a position where we can fix that infrastructure, and it’s very expensive as I’m sure you can imagine,” Haws said. “The city’s water situation is a struggle, without question.”
Haws would not confirm whether anyone had gotten sick from the water. He acknowledged discussions about forming a committee to address the issue.
On April 21, the city itself issued a formal boil water notice, telling residents not to drink, cook with, or wash dishes in the water without boiling it first.
That notice came fifteen days after the Trinidad Police Department posted a public warning on Facebook, citing the false alarm statute and telling residents that false reports about a public water supply could be elevated to a state jail felony.
So the city’s own police department threatened felony prosecution over claims about water safety, and then two weeks later the city confirmed the water required boiling before use.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality confirmed it received a complaint about Trinidad’s water and that an investigation is ongoing.
Combs told FOX 4 that multiple citizens had posted on Trinidad PD’s own Facebook page claiming they were hospitalized or affected by the water. She was gathering those reports and passing them along.
The police chief’s position is that her hospitalization claims “are simply false and have only caused unnecessary fear and confusion in our community.” Chief Charles Gregory called the case “cut and dry.”
What Gregory is really saying is that a resident who collected and shared reports from her neighbors about a public health issue, on a platform where those same neighbors were posting similar complaints, committed a felony by doing so.
The statute requires that a person *knowingly* circulate a false report. Combs says she was repeating what people told her. Gregory says she should have verified it with the hospitals first. One of those positions treats citizens as participants in public life. The other treats them as suspects.
“It was probably one of the most humiliating things I’ve ever gone through in my entire life. It was very, very bad,” Combs said of her night in jail.
“I feel like this is an extreme stretch,” she added.
Combs pointed to the broader situation residents face. “There’s people that are saying that their appliances are getting ruined, they can’t cook with the water, they can’t bathe with it, they can’t do laundry,” she said. “A lot of them feel hushed, and like they don’t have a voice and no one listens to them and no one takes them seriously.”
That last part is the chilling effect laid bare. When a city arrests someone for a Facebook post about water quality, the message to every other resident is clear: talk about this and you could be next.
The false alarm statute exists to punish people who deliberately fabricate emergencies to waste public resources. Using it against a woman who said “we have received reports” about a water problem that the city itself later confirmed is a use of law enforcement to silence public speech about a public safety failure.
Whether Combs’ specific claim about hospitalizations was accurate or not, the arrest tells every resident in Trinidad that raising concerns about their water can land them in jail. That is a more dangerous outcome than any Facebook post.
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