INGLESIDE, Texas — A Coastal Bend woman was kicked out of an Ingleside City Council meeting for seemingly doing nothing wrong, and she is speaking out.
The city held a special meeting Monday night to address the issue, and when we asked Cynthia Torres if she was satisfied with the city’s response, she told us, “no, I'm not because nobody was held accountable for what they did. It was just 'let's get this meeting over with. Let's get it done and be over with it. She obviously doesn't realize her constitutional rights were violated'.”
Moments before, councilman Steve Diehl told us, “we welcome people to come and talk to the council. They will not be bashed. Citizens have a right, a right to come to this council. Also, the meetings start at 6:30. Not 7 o'clock and I do think there was a little confusion there.”
The night of the meeting in question, Torres showed up at 7 p.m. and the public comment portion of the meeting had already ended.
Torres came to the meeting and waited in the back of the room to speak about the living conditions at the Bay City Flats apartment complex where she currently lives, but before she could do or say anything, Torres tells us Ingleside police signaled her to come outside.
Video from the meeting shows Torres standing in the back, documents in hand, and waiting to speak.
Moment later, Torres can no longer be seen in the video and once outside, she took to Facebook Live to question the two officers outside.
“I should have never been thrown out of the meeting,” Torres told us.
The day after the meeting, we alerted Ingleside Mayor Ronnie Parker who later admitted to us that they violated her constitutional rights. The mayor going on to say, “The city is wrong. We’re dead wrong.... It doesn’t matter who is at that meeting if they aren’t acting up, you can’t have them removed.”
When asked if she did anything wrong that would have forced them to throw her out of the meeting, Torres said, “No, sir... nothing at all.”
