Prosecutors drop obstruction charge against Eastern Washington student involved in November protest

Prosecutors have dropped an obstruction charge against a former Eastern Washington University student who was arrested during a protest against street preachers on the Cheney campus last fall.

Maya Caruth, 26, was arrested on Nov. 7 after crossing a “safety zone” that separated hundreds of student protesters from three religious activists who arrived on campus with signs and a portable speaker, preaching in derogatory terms about LGBTQ people. Police said Caruth was uncooperative and refused to return to the student group. Her attorney has argued she was trying to broker peace between the two sides.

Cheney Municipal Prosecutor Angelle Gerl moved to dismiss the charge last week, noting that Caruth has no criminal history and was a member of EWU’s student government.

“While the prosecution asserts that there are sufficient facts to convict the defendant, the prosecution has also considered the emotionally heated topic of the protest on Nov. 7, 2019, the defendant’s youthfulness and ability to appropriately process such a passionate moment at a young age, and the nature of the charges against her,” Gerl wrote in her motion.

Such a case typically would have been resolved through a diversion program, Gerl wrote. The charge should be dropped, she wrote, “as the defendant has presumably learned much from the incident and the city sees little benefit in a conviction at this juncture.”

During the protest, police separated the preachers from the other demonstrators as a crowd-control tactic aimed at preventing violence. Officers created a 15-foot buffer zone with the students on one side and the preachers on the other.

According to court records, Caruth and one of the preachers were trying to speak with each other when Caruth was arrested. In his report, the arresting officer wrote that he had warned Caruth to move at least five times before arresting her, and afterward she continued to be uncooperative, slipping out of handcuffs in the back of his patrol car.

Cheney police Capt. Rick Beghtol said Caruth’s refusal to stay on the student side might have encouraged other students to cross the buffer zone, creating a volatile situation.

“We did not want to arrest her at all. That was not the goal,” Beghtol said. “The goal was to keep everybody safe on both sides of the discussion, if you want to call it that.”

But Caruth’s attorney, Steve Graham, argued in Cheney Municipal Court that police had no right to arrest Caruth based on assumptions about her ideology or the belief that she belonged on the student side of the buffer zone.

In an email, Graham said there is “no doubt that she would have ultimately prevailed on First Amendment grounds, so I think all the prosecutor could have done was delayed the inevitable.”

One of the religious activists, Thomas R. Meyer, 66, of Rathdrum, was detained on suspicion of spanking and spitting on students, but prosecutors never filed charges against him. Meyer demonstrated on campus with Daniel Rusk, who runs the website walkaboutjesus.com, and Bruce Wakeman, who leads a group called the Lilac City Bible Fellowship and sometimes preaches on street corners in downtown Spokane.

In an interview, Graham and Caruth questioned why so many law enforcement officers were called to the demonstration in the first place.

“The prosecutor seems to think that this was a learning opportunity for me, and I’d like to stress that this is a learning opportunity for the police force,” Caruth said. “I think that this is also a learning opportunity for the university to really look at the way that the student body is impacted by requesting a police presence at student gatherings – especially student gatherings that have not exhibited any sort of violence.”