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Ansché Hedgepeth is appalled that despite her lawsuit, brutal child arrests continue in D.C.
Her case made international news and made her a figure in the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who ruled in a 2004 opinion that Hedgepeth’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated, even if the transit officers overreacted.
“No one is very happy about the events that led to this litigation,” Roberts, then a circuit judge on the U.S. District Court in D.C., wrote in that opinion.
“A twelve-year-old girl was arrested, searched, and handcuffed. Her shoelaces were removed, and she was transported in the windowless rear compartment of a police vehicle to a juvenile processing center, where she was booked, fingerprinted, and detained until released to her mother some three hours later — all for eating a single french fry in a Metrorail station,” Roberts wrote. “The child was frightened, embarrassed, and crying throughout the ordeal.”
I remember sitting in her bedroom talking to her. She had a science fair trophy by her bed and had never been in that kind of trouble before.
“I was embarrassed,” she told me back then. “[The officer] said: ‘Put down your fries. Put down your book bag.’ They searched my book bag and searched me. They asked me if I have any drugs or alcohol.”
Today, she is outraged.
Because 24 years later, despite a grueling court case she and her mother endured that forever changed Transit Police policy on arresting children, other behavior hasn’t changed much.
“It’s important to note police brutality is way worse now than when I was a child,” she said, upon learning of the horrific case of Niko Estep, who never recovered from the trauma of being arrested and humiliated — much like Hedgepeth was — when he was 9.
“What happened to Niko never should have happened. Niko wasn’t a threat to any of those officers, and their use of force was outrageous and unnecessary. The police are supposed to protect our community, and instead they traumatized Niko,” his mom, Autumn Drayton, said when she filed a lawsuit against police Wednesday, the exact 24-year anniversary of the day the young Ansché was arrested.
“He never fully recovered from the incident, and he went from being an outgoing and social little boy to being distant and withdrawn and terrified of authority figures and the people who were supposed to keep him safe,” Drayton told The Washington Post’s Ellie Silverman.
Two D.C. police officers came up to Niko when he was leaning against a car on an April day in 2019 and told him to move. He “made a disrespectful comment” and ran, according to Drayton’s lawsuit.
A video shows an officer, identified as Joseph Lopez in the suit, yanking the boy’s jacket, dragging him to the sidewalk after he fell, and placing handcuffs around his wrists as he cried and wet himself in fear.
That video made the rounds at school. Three months later, Niko was admitted to an inpatient psychiatric ward after attempting suicide, according to the lawsuit. D.C. police changed their policy on handcuffing children the following year. But the suit alleges these incidents still occur.
Niko was killed at 14 in an unrelated incident last year.
“I hate that that happened to him,” said Hedgepeth, who is now 36, an executive manager at a national association and a newlywed.
She remembered the tween discomfort of being the focus of a national incident as a seventh-grader.
“It was hard as a kid. Coming out and speaking about it, and it being in the news, triggered attention I didn’t want or need as a 12-year-old,” she said.
“Lots of teasing and being called ‘French Fry’ for years,” she said. “But for me, I was able to overcome. I was able to push through and continue with my life.”
She said she tucked the trauma of it away, “and eventually the teasing stopped. Every now and then the story resurfaces, and people are almost shocked that it was me,” she said.
When Hedgepeth was arrested, it was Transit Police policy to issue a citation to anyone caught eating on the Metro. The strict enforcement is largely tolerated and welcomed in a system known to be way cleaner than the more infamous filth on the one up north.
But the protocol for snacking kids in D.C. was arrest.
Hedgepeth had just bought a snack at the place where most Alice Deal Middle School kids hung out in 2000, and was finishing up the fries as she rode the escalator down to the busy Northwest D.C. metro station to head home.
That’s when the officer nabbed her during the first day of a systemwide crackdown on snacking.
“My principal wanted to suspend me from school. Metro [police] wanted it on my record. But none of those happened,” Hedgepeth told me. “I’m so grateful to my parents for advocating for me.”
Back then, Metro Transit Police Chief Barry J. McDevitt, was unapologetic for such arrests and told me, “We really do believe in zero tolerance.”
The absurd arrest made international headlines, and the family’s lawsuit led to a policy change.
“The incident was a catalyst for a warning system now in use,” Metro spokeswoman Candace Smith told me when I followed up in 2006, pointing to rule changes such that if police find a youth snacking illegally, they issue a written warning, after three of which the juvenile is charged.
That was the year my son, now a senior at Duke Ellington High School who rides the same Metro line that Hedgepeth rode, was born. Her arrest and dogged pursuit for change affects my kid’s crew of teens every day.
Hedgepeth would rather have nothing to do with her fry days, but agreed to talk with me this week because her case is a reminder that advocacy and a pursuit of justice can matter.
“I definitely made change,” she said. “And I’m forever proud of that.”
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