UA Drug Raid

University of Alabama student James Blackwood was arrested during the Feb. 19, 2013 drug raid in Tuscaloosa that resulted in the arrests of 61 students and 13 non-students. (Connor Sheets | csheets@al.com)

James Blackwood was fast asleep when they raided his dormitory in the early-morning hours of Feb. 19, 2013, barely a month into his second semester at the University of Alabama.

He says he awoke at about 3:00 a.m. to loud, persistent pounding on the front door of his on-campus suite, and that a police officer broke down the door right as he got to it wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.

"As I'm opening the door they're kicking it in. It just goes 'wham' and hits me right in the face, in the nose," Blackwood said. "I went to the ground and then immediately I see this guy standing over me with this bulletproof vest on and an M4 assault rifle in my face."

Officers representing multiple law enforcement agencies proceeded to search the apartment on a warrant to arrest a roommate of his they suspected of being a drug dealer. They found a marijuana grinder and a small amount of pot in Blackwood's room and arrested the scruffy-haired student, giving him a minute to throw on some clothes before they handcuffed him.

He was led out of his on-campus residence hall, Ridgecrest South, and into the back of a long white van. The scene mirrored the stories of nearly a dozen other current and former UA students who spoke with AL.com over the past two months about their arrests that unprecedented day, stories which are substantiated by police accounts included in the resulting court documents.

"There were people being herded out of the dorms into these police vans, dozens of kids, dozens of us," said Blackwood, who was eventually charged with one count each of possession of marijuana and possession of paraphernalia. "We're all being funneled out. They'll file out like five or six of us and walk us in lines to the vans like Gestapo or something."

'The raid of 2013'

When it was all said and done, 61 students and 13 non-students were arrested in on-campus dorms and off-campus houses and apartment buildings across the city of Tuscaloosa over the course of several hours that chilly February morning. Members of multiple fraternities were arrested and charged with minor drug offenses, and officers busted at least one Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) brother inside the fraternity's house on University Boulevard during the operation.

The raid, led by the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force, has had life-changing repercussions for many of the students who were taken to the Tuscaloosa County jail that day. It also generated significant controversy over the priorities and practices of Tuscaloosa's various local law enforcement agencies.

Authorities in the college town have repeatedly come under criticism in recent years for employing what many perceive to be heavy-handed tactics, most recently following an incident last month that led to three Tuscaloosa Police Department officers being suspended after video emerged of them using a Taser and baton on students while responding to an on-campus noise complaint. For many, the winter 2013 drug raid only provided fuel for the police vs. students narrative.

Capt. Wayne Robertson, commander of the narcotics task force - to which representatives of multiple local law enforcement agencies including the Tuscaloosa Police Department are assigned - declined to discuss the raid for this story. He referred inquiries to Lt. Teena Richardson, a spokeswoman for the Tuscaloosa Police Department, who defended the operation in brief remarks via telephone earlier this month.

"There's controversy because it was University of Alabama students. If it wasn't University of Alabama students there wouldn't have been any controversy," Richardson said. "In a drug investigation you go where the investigation takes you and that's as much as I can tell you about that."

In the end, the charges against Blackwood didn't stick, and he was never convicted of any crime. Neither were many of the other students arrested that chilly February morning in a crackdown that is still known on campus as "the raid of 2013."

But the fallout continues to plague many of them to this day, and numerous UA students told AL.com it forever changed the relationship between the student body and the police.

'Very proud'

Local law enforcement touted the raid as a major success that resulted in the arrests of a "record" number of accused drug offenders while going a long way toward cleaning up drug crime in Tuscaloosa.

"It's a record number because of the number of individuals we've arrested, obviously, but it also shows the dedication and new leadership that we have in that particular unit," Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson said during a press conference held the day of the raid. "We have a leader now that's in that unit and he's very bold and he's aggressive and he knows what the problems are that we're facing in our community. He's dedicated himself to addressing those issues, and I'm very proud of that."

Most of the 61 students arrested during the raid eventually had to pay thousands of dollars in fines, court costs and lawyer's fees, were forced to take months of compulsory drug education courses and drug tests and landed in varying degrees of trouble with the university, all despite the fact that many were never convicted of a crime. Many dropped out of school, took a semester or two off or transferred to another university in the wake of the raid.

Judy Bonner, who was president of the university at the time, sent a statement to UA students, faculty and staff on the day of the sweep, explaining what had taken place and responding on behalf of the university.

"The students who were arrested will be referred to Judicial Affairs," Bonner wrote. "Once judicial reviews are completed, students will receive sanctions up to and including expulsion. UA has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to the sale or distribution of drugs, on or off campus, and we will continue to vigorously enforce that policy."

Samuel Major was a sophomore majoring in business at Alabama when he was arrested that morning on two charges of selling marijuana within three miles of a school, and one charge each of marijuana possession and paraphernalia possession. He admits that he sold small quantities of weed to friends, but says that the raid and its aftermath were so disruptive and traumatic that he eventually dropped out of school and returned home to Florida.

"I've come to terms with it, but I ended up leaving school ... I'm actually just getting my real estate license now. I'm pretty well off right now," he told AL.com via telephone from Florida earlier this month. "It's defined me, I guess; it's made me a better person, I suppose. I learned that bad things happen to good people. I was being stupid at the time and I was 19, but I wasn't a bad person. I wasn't selling cocaine or anything."

Despite the fact that Major accepted a plea deal and received only two years of unsupervised probation as punishment in the end, he - like all the other students AL.com spoke with about the raid - said his arrest still caused a major upheaval in his life.

He said he paid more than $20,000 in lawyer and court fees associated with his case, had to take multiple flights between Florida and Alabama to appear in court and paid UA about $40,000 in out-of-state tuition toward a degree he would never end up receiving.

'They didn't know anything'

The University of Alabama declined to facilitate an interview with an administrator or other representative who could speak with AL.com about the Feb. 19, 2013 raid and school officials' opinions on it. But multiple students arrested that day said in interviews that they were told by administrators that the school was upset that the task force targeted students for low-level marijuana offenses and that the drug unit did not work closely enough with the school during the lead-up to the busts.

Chris Bryant, a spokesman for the University of Alabama, declined to answer a series of detailed questions about the raid and the university's take on it, instead emailing a short written statement four weeks after he responded to the first in a series of AL.com inquiries about this story.

"In response to your questions about actions taken by the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force nearly three years ago: We will continue to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies to help ensure the safety and well-being of our campus and community," the statement read. "UAPD has representation on the task force. Students who choose to violate the law and our Student Code of Conduct will be subject to appropriate and timely disciplinary actions."

Jonathan Cross, chief deputy district attorney for Tuscaloosa County, declined to comment on the investigation and prosecution of the people arrested in the raid.

"A few of those cases are still pending and at this time I can't make any comment," Cross said earlier this month. "There's an ongoing investigation."

But a number of students who were held for more than a day in the "Pink Room" - a bare-bones holding cell in the Tuscaloosa County jail often used to hold drunks overnight as they sober up - after the raid are still angered by the way they were treated. So are many of their parents.

"I never dreamed this would happen. That raid was just awful. It was ridiculous, that could really ruin kids' lives," the mother of a student who transferred to another school after being arrested in his dorm room that morning told AL.com.

"They just came down the hall and said 'you gotta open up the door.' Of course these kids were freshmen; they didn't know anything. [My son] had never been around pot, he went to a small private school and he was sheltered. He should've never let the cops in his room in the first place."

Local authorities see things differently. During the press conference held just hours after the 2013 raid, Anderson, the Tuscaloosa police chief, responded to the opinion held by many students and parents that marijuana is a benign drug that college students often experiment with, and that police should target harder drugs and violent crime and be more lenient with English majors passing bongs around their dorm rooms.

"I know a lot of people consider [marijuana] to be a harmless drug. It's still illegal to possess it, distribute and traffic it in the state of Alabama. Therefore, it's against the law and we're going to enforce the law no matter how harmless people think it is," Anderson said at the time, according to the Tuscaloosa News. "We want to send a clear message that it's not going to be tolerated and if we discover who you are, we are going to come after you."

Robertson, the commander of the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force, echoed those sentiments in an interview with Alabama Dateline earlier this month, explaining that the unit is dedicated to fighting marijuana use and distribution.

"We deal mostly with marijuana," he said. "Being a college town, we are going to see more of marijuana than we'll see of anything."

'They milk you dry'

Of the 11 Alabama colleges and universities that enroll the most students, UA had the most drug arrests between 2005 and 2010 with a total of 308, according to a 2011 Birmingham News analysis of crime data reported by the schools over that six-year period.

Between 2012 and 2014 alone, UA reported 261 drug law violations, according to the university's 2015 Annual Campus Security and Fire Safety Report. Over that same three-year period, the small, private liberal arts school Birmingham-Southern College reported a total of zero such violations.

Meanwhile, the narcotics task force - which is made up of officers from the Tuscaloosa, Northport and University of Alabama police departments, as well as representatives of the offices of the Tuscaloosa County sheriff and district attorney - has flourished in recent years, seizing millions of dollars, a significant percentage of which is ultimately diverted back to the unit.

Court documents reveal that at least $9,498 was seized from people arrested during the February 19, 2013 raid alone, AL.com reported six months after it went down. Officers seized cash from at least 12 of the people arrested during the raid, in amounts ranging from $290 to more than $2,300, the court records show.

As for the impact on students, a total of $8,636 was taken from 10 students that morning, and there were likely other seizures from students that were not recorded in open court documents. Exact figures cannot be calculated because access to the court records of nine of the people arrested was blocked, probably because they were granted youthful offender status, a representative of the Tuscaloosa district attorney's office told AL.com in August 2013.

In recent years, there have been more arrests for marijuana in Tuscaloosa than in the much larger city of Birmingham. There were 1,089 arrests for marijuana possession in Tuscaloosa last year, while Birmingham saw just 901, according to crime statistics reported by local law enforcement agencies.

The task force's reach has grown in recent years, and so has its impact on the local community. In 2014, the task force seized $861,131 in cash and drugs with a total street value of more than $1.1 million - including 90 pounds of marijuana - while making more than 1,677 arrests on 3,121 drug charges in the process, AL.com reported in January. The number of charges resulting from the task force's efforts has increased every year since 2008, a phenomenon Robertson has attributed in part to the University of Alabama's steadily rising student population.

In January, he described the seizures as vital to the task force's continued success, as nearly $300,000 of the money the unit seized in 2014 was funneled back to its operations.

"That is one of our missions, to seize drug dealers' assets and it's one way to hurt them, by taking things from them that they earned from the proceeds of drug sales," Robertson said at the time. "Most of these monies are spent on equipment, vehicles for agents, undercover operations, office equipment, etc. That money is very important, and it saves taxpayers a lot of money each year."

Robertson replaced former task force commander Jeffrey Snyder in 2012 as the unit headed for the lowest point in its history of more than four decades. In March 2013 - one month after the so-called "raid of 2013" - federal prosecutors charged Snyder with stealing at least $125,000 in seized funds from the task force.

Snyder pleaded guilty to stealing the cash in June 2013 and was sentenced that December to a year and a day in federal prison and ordered to pay the task force $125,000 in restitution. The public's perception of the unit has never recovered.

Multiple students who spoke with AL.com said they see the raid and many other anti-drug police efforts as little more than cash generators for local law enforcement agencies.

"When you get caught up in the system it just becomes so obvious how it's just focused on how much money they can get out of you," Blackwood said, echoing the sentiments of multiple other UA students who spoke to AL.com anonymously. "They milk you dry. It's so sad."

Meanwhile, anger continues to simmer among those arrested during the February 2013 raid and many outside observers over the way the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force got the information it used to obtain warrants to make many of the arrests. Specifically, the unit used multiple UA students as confidential informants, convincing them to gather incriminating information on other students in return for leniency.

This exclusive report on drug culture on university campuses is the second in an ongoing AL.com series. Look for other stories in the coming days. The next installment focuses on the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force's use of University of Alabama students as confidential informants.