A Bexar County sheriff’s deputy held Alek Schott, an oilfield equipment salesman from the Houston area, on the shoulder of Interstate 35 for 76 minutes in March 2022 after a camera flagged his truck. A federal jury in San Antonio has now found the county liable for it. The jury’s verdict, dated Sept. 28 on the court docket, awarded Schott $76, a dollar for every minute of the stop, which is the amount Texas Public Radio reported he sued for.
A stop that started with cameras
According to the Institute for Justice, the law firm that represented Schott, he drove from his home near Houston to a well pad outside Carrizo Springs on March 15, 2022, spent the night at a hotel, and headed home in his Ford F-250. Cameras operated by the federal government flagged the truck. The tip reached the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office through a WhatsApp group chat called the “Northwest Highway Group,” and Deputy Joel Babb testified that it came from a man he knew only as “Kiki,” whom Babb believed worked at a federal fusion center in Laredo.
Babb waited on the shoulder, followed the truck, and stopped it. He told Schott the reason was that the truck had drifted across the fog line. IJ says the evidence shown at trial showed it never did. Schott was questioned in the front seat of a patrol car, and a drug dog alerted on his truck. IJ says deputies found nothing. Schott said in IJ’s release that he filed a complaint with the Sheriff’s Office afterward and that the department reviewed it, found no violation, and told him to sue if he had a problem. The Sheriff’s Office told Texas Public Radio it does not comment on active lawsuits and referred questions to the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, which had not responded by publication time.
Why one stop was enough to hold a county liable
A county does not pay for a deputy’s bad stop just because the deputy made it. Schott sued under the federal civil rights statute, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and under the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Monell v. Department of Social Services he had to show that the county had a policy or custom behind what happened to him. IJ’s release spells out the elements: a practice of stopping and searching drivers this way, a sheriff who knew or should have known about it, and a link between the practice and Schott’s stop. The jury, according to IJ, agreed on all of it and found the practice violated Schott’s Fourth Amendment rights…