At Tuesday’s Killeen City Council meeting, Camron
Cochran, a regular council attendee and critic, was thrown out of the meeting and ordered off the premises by Mayor Debbie Nash-King after he disrupted the meeting.
Almost immediately afterward, Sean Price, another council critic, was thrown out after he started talking about Israeli hostages, an off-topic conversation in a meeting about the proposed fiscal year 2025 budget.
In past meetings, Nash-King would issue multiple warnings but normally would not throw out residents very quickly, but City Manager Kent Cagle said recent conversations around the issue have changed.
Cagle told the Herald that they didn’t want a repeat of what happened at the meeting on June 25
when former councilwoman Mellisa Brown was arrested. He said when people get thrown out, they don’t want them hanging out in the hallways or in the parking lot.
And, significantly, they don’t want them coming back to subsequent meetings either.
“We did change our tactics and make it clear if you’re kicked out of
a meeting it’s for the day,” Cagle said. “It’s a criminal trespass warning.”
Brown had been arrested after being thrown out of a previous meeting on June 25 for disruption. She returned to another meeting later that evening and was arrested.
Michael Fornino was thrown out also for yelling and cussing at Nash-King
on June 25, and spent much of the time in the hallway of the building just outside of the council chambers.
Cagle said the reason that this had been enforced so inconsistently in the past is because the city of Killeen had never anticipated the constant disruptions at City Council meetings being such a problem.
“I don’t think anybody anticipated that type of behavior,” Cagle said.
Brown, in an interview with the Herald last week, argued that she has been allowed to return to other meetings after being kicked out of previous ones in the past.
“The mayor can only remove a
person for a singular meeting at a time,” she said, explaining that she didn’t think she was being disruptive and she also wasn’t aware that another meeting was happening because she thought they had adjourned.
The meeting being held was an Employee Trust meeting for city employees following the regular City Council meeting.
At that time, Brown had been surrounded by Killeen Police Department officers for several minutes before ultimately being placed into handcuffs.
Nash-King did not appear to order her arrest, but she did ask Killeen Police Chief Pete Lopez Jr. to remove her from the council chambers.
According
to the arrest affidavit the city of Killeen released to the Herald, “Mellisa (Brown) refused to depart after she was told to leave; due to her uncomplying behavior, she was arrested for Criminal Trespass.”
The city released the affidavit and Brown’s mugshot from her arrest after the Herald filed a pair of open-record requests with the city.
After Price was ejected from Tuesday’s meeting, he could still be seen wandering and shouting around the parking lot of City Hall at approximately 8:30 p.m., but he was not arrested.
