By Bud Kennedy
bud@star-telegram.com
Texas Christian University officials set out to answer questions about campus drug use.
But here's a new question for TCU:
Seriously, is this all you've got?
A few grow-your-own pot smokers and a couple of pill peddlers don't add up to a severely dangerous drug problem, or justify ballyhoo usually reserved for the decennial change of sports conferences.
Yes, one of the 18 scattered arrests after a six-month drug crackdown involved cocaine. Police say more are coming.
But so far, most cases involve young people making dumb mistakes: selling their bathtub homegrown to a stranger, or lying about a pill being LSD.
This is not the work of the Zetas or the Gulf cartels.
To pad the count to 18, police included minor drug deals as far away from campus as Haltom City or Hulen Mall that only coincidentally involved students from TCU.
The list even included one case involving a man who is not a TCU student and doesn't live near campus. Police say he sold a quarter-ounce of pot.
Other cases were beefed up only because police arranged deliveries near campus, inside the lawful "drug-free zone."
Then there's the ruinous mistake involving Austin Carpenter, 26.
He lives in Dallas, not near TCU.
He didn't go to TCU. He went to Texas Tech.
Yet somehow, the detective leading the investigation misidentified Carpenter as the man who sold Vicodin, Xanax and Oxycontin on three occasions near campus.
According to his affidavit, Fort Worth police Detective J.C. Williams checked the license plate on the truck and found that it was registered to a Carpenter family, then looked for a relative named Austin.
When he found Austin Carpenter's driver's license photo, Williams swore that was the man he had met three times.
He wasn't.
After the innocent Carpenter's name and photo were circulated around the world as one of the "TCU 18," police withdrew the warrant and published a retraction.
But the damage is done.
If Williams can't accurately identify a man he met three times, then jurors may not believe he could identify anyone else.
This is the same detective whose colorful but irrelevant conversations with TCU football players needlessly became worldwide sports page gossip.
Maybe TCU officials should be the ones asking the questions.
Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538,Twitter: @budkennedy
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