A BUST GOES BUST

A Former Dallas Police Officer Says Her Partner Had No Right To
Search A Car For Drugs

On an April evening in 2006, two police officers were patrolling a
crime-ridden neighborhood in Northwest Dallas, a few miles south of
Love Field. One cop was a respected veteran, the other a rookie less
than a month out of the academy, now learning on the job. The two saw
a BMW pull out of a dilapidated apartment complex where drugs are
often peddled.

Suspicious that the driver of the car may have just hooked up with a
dealer, they looked for an excuse to stop the vehicle for a traffic
violation.

When the driver rolled through a stop sign on a right turn onto Maple
Avenue, the officers pulled the car over into a lit parking lot.

The veteran officer, David W. Kattner, approached the vehicle on the
driver's side window, while the rookie, Shanna Lopez, took the
passenger side. Both shined their flashlights into the BMW. According
to the police report, Kattner could clearly see a bright-blue plastic
bottle top with an attached spoon, which is commonly used for snorting
cocaine.

On the tip of the spoon, he saw a residue of white
powder.

Also, on the passenger seat, they saw a pink plastic straw, which
appeared to contain a powdery white substance.

They arrested the driver, a Mongolian woman named Buyandelger
Galbadrakh, and Kattner searched the vehicle and found meth, ecstasy
and coke. That night they took her to the Dallas County jail and
booked her on felony drug possession charges.

It was just another routine drug arrest in a bad part of town, but
more than a year later, it may come back to haunt a department reeling
from accusations that at least three of its officers may have written
fake tickets and made false arrests.

The rookie officer the night of the arrest is no longer with the
force, having accused Kattner, her one-time training officer, of
preying on known criminals by charging them with phantom crimes.

In an interview with D magazine reporter Trey Garrison, Lopez, 32,
said that Kattner used to review the county's criminal database for
names of women arrested for street crimes and then write them tickets
for additional infractions that he never witnessed.

Lopez said that three of Kattner's colleagues more or less did the
same thing.

Other officers corroborated her allegations, and after an internal
investigation, those cops have been suspended from active duty.
Kattner, though, was not the subject of any investigation and remains
on patrol.

Meanwhile, Lopez was dismissed from the force a few days after she
received a commendation for helping arrest a hit-and-run suspect who
attempted to flee on foot. She claims she was let go because she
talked about Kattner's conduct with another officer.

Attorney George Milner, who is defending Galbadrakh, read the D story
and now plans to attack Kattner's credibility. He may have a pretty
good witness.

In an interview with the Dallas Observer, Lopez says that Kattner
searched the car without consent.

In fact, she says that during the stop at the parking lot, while she
was shining a flashlight into the BMW, she never saw anything
suspicious-even though the police report claims that the bottle top
with the attached spoon was in the center console of the vehicle while
the straw with the white powder residue was in the passenger seat,
presumably right in Lopez's line of vision.

She says that Kattner first told Galbadrakh that he pulled her over
because he had reports that a sedan like hers had been stolen in a
carjacking, a story that the veteran officer never shared with Lopez.
He then pressured Galbadrakh to give her consent to search the
vehicle, but she refused.

He searched it anyway, which if true would be illegal, and came upon
methamphetamine, coke and ecstasy.

"She did have drugs on her, but whatever we found on her, all the
contraband, is irrelevant because we didn't have probable cause to
search," Lopez says. "He set her up. She never gave consent; he found
the contraband by digging through her stuff, and that led to the other
chain of events."

Later that evening at the jail, Kattner asked her if she had seen the
straw in plain view in the car. When she said no, he told her slowly,
"It was in plain view," the legal threshold needed to search a car for
drugs without the driver's consent.

At first Lopez doubted herself, but as she continued to go over what
happened during that stop, Kattner's actions didn't make sense. "If he
saw it in plain view, then why did he go around and around trying to
get her consent?" she says. "In my opinion he was convinced there was
going to be dope in there because of his initial reason that it was a
nice car in an apartment complex known for selling drugs."

If Lopez repeats these comments to a judge, the case against
Galbadrakh could be very well be dismissed.

Her story corroborates the defendant's account that the officerasked
to search her car, and she refused.