Remember that story about the DEA raid on the smoke shop in Alpine? How the feds showed up dressed for a fire fight, and allegedly threw a woman to the ground, and then arrested her for striking an officer when her flailing feet struck the agent that was manhandling her? How they searched the house next door five hours before they got a warrant? And how the federal judge forced the defendant to recant her account of the events as a condition of bail, even though no investigation of facts of the incident had taken place? That last part made the Washington Post take notice.
Well, now Reason.com has taken up the sordid story, and they report that there’s more to it than meets the eye. There’s even sex.
Lipsen suspects that the relentless harassment from law enforcement stems from an encounter dating back to when she first arrived in the town as an 18 year-old college freshman.
“I was introduced by a mutual acquaintance to a man who had Arabian horses.”
The man was [former El Pasoan] Rod Ponton, then an attorney in private practice [and currently the Brewster County District Attorney].
“He had invited me to meet his horses at his house, and possibly work with them. I thought, ‘Great! A job opportunity.'” She says that after sharing a bottle of wine with him, “one thing led to another and I was involved sexually with him.”
Though Ponton offered to give his horses to her as a gift, Lipsen says she was “disgusted with herself” and declined to have any further involvement with Ponton or his horses after that. She claims to have seen Ponton drive slowly past her house “almost like he was stalking me.”
The story has almost everything you could want. SWAT teams, an over-zealous judiciary, and law-enforcement trying to coerce the media. Read the whole story at Reason.com, and a brief piece from the Big Bend Courier.