Deputy accuses driver of holding phone with missing hand in viral traffic stop
Florida police pulled over a woman for holding her phone in her right hand while driving.
The issue? The driver was missing her right hand.
The uncomfortable interaction was captured on body camera footage that was released this week and shared on social media where it quickly went viral.
Kathleen Thomas, 36, was driving in Lake Worth in February when she was pulled over by a deputy from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. The deputy approached her car and explained the traffic stop was because he saw her holding a cellphone in her right hand.
“Obviously not,” Thomas said, laughing, as she raised her right arm to reveal the missing limb. “So, you want to just call this a day?”
The bodycam video shows the deputy, whose name has not been released, insisting he saw Thomas holding a phone, as she again shows her right arm, which stops at the elbow.
“Hand to God, you didn’t have a phone in your hand?” the deputy asks.
“Hand to God,” Thomas responds as she lifts her right arm.
The deputy then asks her to lift her other, and only, hand and swear “to God.”
Thomas, who was born without her lower right arm, said she felt very uncomfortable by the interaction.
“Immediately, I was being my normal self and threw up my hand to God. He did not recognize that as a sufficient hand to raise to God, which is ironic considering that’s who gave it to me. He proceeds to ask me to do my left, which is like, ‘OK, cool,’” Thomas said in an interview Friday on “CBS Mornings.”
The deputy issued her a $116 ticket. Ahead of a scheduled court appearance on Wednesday to fight the ticket, Thomas obtained the bodycam footage and posted it on TikTok, where it has racked up more than 23 million views as of Friday morning.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement to NBC News that the deputy “initiated a traffic stop based upon his visual observation at the time of the incident.” The department said the ticket was dismissed after a review of the laws and “based upon the totality of the circumstances, specifically the lack of clarity on how violations are labeled in our citation software.”
Court records show the deputy who issued the ticket made the request Monday for the case to be dismissed, citing “insufficient evidence.” His request was granted on Tuesday.
Thomas told CBS News she doesn’t believe the deputy meant any harm, but noted he likely wasn’t trained to deal with a situation like this.
“I was born this way,” Thomas said. “It’s never going to change. It’s never going to hold a phone. I would love people to take away is that limb difference is normal. Somebody who looks different than you is normal. All of that is normal. Normal is whoever you’re most comfortable being.”
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