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Texas police apologize for mistakenly pulling over mom and kids at gunpoint

Police in Forney, Texas, have apologized to a mother and four young children after a mix-up led officers to hold the woman’s vehicle at gunpoint earlier this month.Footage of the Aug. 9 traffic stop, captured by a police dashboard camera, shows an officer ordering Kametra Barbour to exit her car and place her hands behind her head. “My kids! They’re 6 and 8 and 10, 9. What are we doing?” B

Police in Forney, Texas, have apologized to a mother and four young children after a mix-up led officers to hold the woman’s vehicle at gunpoint earlier this month.

Footage of the Aug. 9 traffic stop, captured by a police dashboard camera, shows an officer ordering Kametra Barbour to exit her car and place her hands behind her head. “My kids! They’re 6 and 8 and 10, 9. What are we doing?” Barbour can be heard pleading as she is handcuffed. “Oh, my God — you will terrify my children!"

Only then do officers realize they have the wrong person.

“Gun down, gun down,” one officer says before he and another officer try to calm the crying kids, one of whom crept from the car with his own hands held in the air.

In a statement released Sunday, the Forney Police Department said officers had been pursuing a vehicle whose passengers were seen waving a gun from the windows. A 911 caller reportedly confused Barbour’s car with the other vehicle, the statement went on to say, which explains why police stopped the law-abiding motorist with their firearms drawn.

Barbour took to Facebook last week to say she still was shaken by the incident. “We went from having a good old time shopping in the store and enjoying each other … to this horrible interactions (sic) with the police,” she wrote. But she added that she hoped the children would come away with a valuable lesson about mistakes — and how “your life can change in a matter of seconds.”

“You must not be bitter or angry just try to stay calm in a situation like this,” she wrote.

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