Nevada deputy who took $50,000 from a man ordered to return it
Mark Frauenfelder
In September 2013 Tan Nguyen was pulled over by Nevada Deputy Sgt. Lee Dove for driving 78 MPH in a 75 MPH zone. Deputy Dove asked Nguyen for permission to search the car and Nguyen consented to the search. (Big mistake. He should have done this instead.) Deputy Dove found $50,000 in Nguyen’s briefcase and confiscated it. Deputy Dove did not charge Nguyen with any crime. Nguyen asked Deputy Dove not to take his money, which he said was casino winnings. According to Nguyen’s lawsuit, Deputy Dove “threatened to seize and tow his car unless he ‘got in his car and drove off and forgot this ever happened.'” This photo of Sgt. Dove with the money he took was posted to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department’s Facebook page.
This story has a happy ending. Nguyen sued the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and got his $50,000 back, plus $10,000 to pay his lawyer. The Humboldt County District Attorney issued a laughably stupid statement that tried to deflect the blame from the sheriff’s department over to the liberal media elite, which had “unfairly criticized the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office as the Sheriff’s Office was acting in accordance with the law as they understood it and was not responsible for any procedural defects following the seizure of assets.”
