Statement of Tricia Boudoin

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

As a mother of a six-year old in a Baptist School and a thirteen-year-old teenager, I am particularly concerned about and aware of the music that children hear on the radio, talk about at school, and buy at the local music store. Everything that we play at the Skate Zone is played on the radio and I wouldn’t play anything at the rink that I wouldn’t be comfortable with my six-year-old hearing.

That said, music does not cause violence. People don’t start fighting just because they hear a song, just like people don’t become depressed from listening to the sad lyrics of country music. But I can be arrested, in the state of Louisiana, for playing the Hokey Pokey.

As a woman and as a human being, I feel embarrassed, deceived and humiliated for the disrespectful treatment that I received at the hands of Sheriff Herbert and his deputies. When Commander Davis, one of the Sheriff’s representatives, suggested that Frank and I meet with the Sheriff in order to work things out, I had no idea that when we went in for the meeting, I would be met with an arrest warrant.

I had no idea that I would be treated like a hardened criminal, fingerprinted, photographed, physically searched, handcuffed to a table and made to stand for hours in a 3 x 3 foot cell all because we played some music the Sheriff didn’t like. They made me walk barefoot into the male inmates restroom at the Iberia Parish Prison in order to take a drug test, when they had no reason to believe I had taken any drugs. And then I was escorted through a prison cell block in front of all the male prisoners who were yelling vile, sexually suggestive statements at me. I thought the doors of their cells were going to open and they would attack me.

My rights were violated and ignored and that is against the law.