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A father brought a custody order to a Mena PD officer and asked him to open a missing persons report for his young son. The officer declined, and the sidewalk exchange escalated into a tense argument about paperwork, duty and the Constitution. It was streamed live from a phone, shared widely afterwards, and it left people stunned.
A Custody Order Held Up
The conversation happens on a sidewalk in front of a stone building, with a white car marked Mena Police at the curb and a flag across the street. The officer stands in a dark uniform, a body camera and radio on his chest, a phone in one hand.
The man holds up a document and says it is a custody order declaring that the child is his. The officer reads it, then asks whether the man actually had the child in his custody at that time. The man answers that the child is missing — that, he says, is the reason he is standing there.
The officer tells him he has been directed to come back and speak with the chief on Friday. The man replies that the situation has long since moved past a single refusal to help.
The Request and the 14th Amendment
The central request is narrow: open a missing persons report. The man says he is asking directly, and warns that his next step would be a writ of habeas corpus to compel the department to act. The officer tells him they do not take that from him.
I'm requesting that you open a missing persons report.
The argument then turns to the 14th Amendment. The man asks whether the officer knows what it is. The officer answers that maybe he does and maybe he does not, and later says it does not matter. The man replies that it is not his job to educate law enforcement.
Neither side gives ground. The man repeats that the dispute is no longer about a department refusing to do its job — he says officers are now preventing him from reaching resources that could help find his son. The officer denies preventing anything and says nothing has been requested from them. Voices overlap; each asks the other not to interrupt.
An Assault Claim and a Fast-Moving Story
Text posted alongside the clip states that the father was attacked by Sgt. Eddie Price of the Mena PD and then arrested, despite a judge's order that the man says was in place. The recorded segment does not show a physical altercation or an arrest; it picks up mid-argument, with one voice saying someone was told to step back and another answering that it was not necessary.
The posting is blunt in its framing of the officer's conduct, and it fueled heated debate online as the clip traveled. Two threads run through the argument for anyone trying to follow it: a parent's demand for a missing persons report, and an officer's insistence on custody and procedure.
No resolution appears on screen. The back-and-forth simply continues, both men talking past each other on the sidewalk while the phone keeps recording.
What happens when a parent's emergency and a department's process collide is a moment of decision — and here, a widely shared one. Some details in this account, including the alleged assault and arrest, come from the caption accompanying the clip and could not be independently confirmed.
Should a police department be required to open a missing persons report when a parent arrives with a custody order and says the child has vanished — and who should decide if it does not?
According to the original video caption; this story was edited from a publicly posted video and some details may not be independently verified.
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