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Police, Bank Respond To Incident That Led To Muslim Family's Arrest

Ark Valley Fire Buff
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flickr Creative Commons

Both Emprise Bank and the Wichita Police Department say they were just following procedure last week during an incident that led to the arrest of a Wichita State University doctoral student of Middle Eastern descent.

Police were called to the bank at 21st and Woodlawn last Wednesday in response to reports of a man with what bank staff believed to be a forged check for $151,000. The WPD says in a statement that one Kansas Highway Patrol Officer, one Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Officer and two Wichita Police officers responded to the call.

Read the WPD's full statement on the investigation here.

The WPD took the man, his wife and teenage daughter into custody. It took 48 minutes to verify that the check was legitimate, and the family was released.

In the statement, police Chief Gordon Ramsay says even though officers followed policy, the department feels "bad for what happened” during the investigation.

In its own statement, Emprise Bank says it doesn’t tolerate discrimination of any kind. They also say they don’t have any control over how law enforcement responds to a call.

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Nadya Faulx is KMUW's Digital News Editor and Reporter, which means she splits her time between working on-air and working online, managing news on KMUW.org, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. She joined KMUW in 2015 after working for a newspaper in western North Dakota. Before that she was a diversity intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.