Police tape

From St, John the Baptist Parish comes the quintessentially American story: Sheriff's deputies seized a loaded AK-47 and other guns while making three arrests at a pre-kindergarten graduation ceremony.

The occasion itself would be unimaginable practically anywhere else on the face of the earth. Suppose you woke up one day and found yourself surrounded by tiny tots tottering around in tasseled mortar boards and downsized academic gowns. A nightmare? No, you know you're in America, when kids barely out of diapers are styled “students.”

This story unfolded at the ceremony marking the end of the academic year at the Garyville Mt. Airy magnet school, a significant occasion for kids and their parents, proud or otherwise, no doubt.

Sure, the hordes of pint-sized graduands are a faintly absurd spectacle, but an occasion that makes participants feel good and does no harm must be a welcome addition to the calendar. The pre-kindergarten graduation is a wholesome American phenomenon.

Guns on campus are a less wholesome American phenomenon. While mass shootings are hardly limited to the United States, they do occur with especially grisly frequency here. Thus, Sheriff Mike Tegre lost no time in unleashing his deputies when a tip came in that some of those attending the graduation were toting firearms.

Anyone with a responsibility for school safety nowadays will be alive to the possibility of yet another homicidal nut on campus. The perpetrators are usually loners, but Tegre no doubt had every reason to fear another shooting was in the offing when his deputies fingered three suspects.

The response seems to have been textbook, to start with. The school was placed in lockdown and, when deputies descended on a car parked outside, Nick Malancon, 24, and a 16-year-old boy jumped out of it and fled in different directions, only to be run down and collared. This was not the young lad's first brush with the law, for he was found to be wearing an ankle monitor attached as a condition of house arrest in St. Charles Parish, where he faces drug and weapons charges.

And here's where the story takes on another quintessentially American aspect: The bungling response from law enforcement.

Tegre's office claimed that surveillance video showed Jaquanna Cage, 25, had driven Malancon and the juvenile to the graduation. Cage was duly booked with the felony of carrying a firearm on school property, and held on bail of $250,000, which is rather more than many a dyed-in-the-wool violent criminal has been required to post. Cage couldn't raise the scratch and sat in jail for a month before St. John Parish prosecutors finally refused to accept the charges against her that had been manifestly groundless from day one. The pistol she had in her car was perfectly legal.

If any laws were broken in the aftermath of the graduation, the culprits were clearly the deputies who forced their way into Cage's car and grabbed the gun stowed in it. No clearer case of illegal search and seizure could be imagined.

Cage took a major financial hit, in addition to the doubtless hair-raising experience of spending several weeks up close and personal with some highly undesirable, not to say scary, characters.

Cage is a disc jockey, but couldn't make any gigs when she got out of jail because her equipment was in her car and Tegre had impounded it.

For her, this was a story with a nasty twist in the tail.

Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.

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