Tonya Couch is seen in a booking photo from the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office.
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Tonya Couch appeared in a yellow jail jumpsuit in her first court appearance Friday morning and told District Judge Wayne Salvant she understood the charges against her.
Salvant also ordered her passport to be confiscated in the short hearing, but Couch, 48, said she does not have a passport. Couch’s attorney is expected to ask to have her bond reduced from $1 million to $15,000. Ethan Couch remains in a Mexican migrant holding facility after filing papers for a stay of deportation. A video surfaced that appeared to show him at a party where people were drinking. Couch, mother of a fugitive teenager known for using an “affluenza” defense in a deadly drunken-driving case, waived extradition and was sent to Texas from California to face a charge of helping her son evade capture.
Salvant said he would attach “a lot of restrictions” to Tonya Couch’s bail, including wearing a GPS-type device on her ankle.
Previous reports indicated that the couple were divorced. The charges against Tonya Couch are all felonies.
She expressed a bit of displeasure about her accommodations.
“It’s jail”, Anderson told reporters after the hearing. Worth court this morning but has not yet entered a plea.
Tonya Couch arrived on Thursday afternoon at DFW Airport and was taken in a van to the Tarrant County jail, where she was booked.
Ethan Couch was sentenced in Tarrant County to 10 years of drink- and drug-free probation, which critics saw as leniency because of his family’s wealth. Couch’s attorney Stephanie Patten got held up in traffic and could not be by her client’s side.
Couch told the judge that she surrendered a temporary passport in Los Angeles, where she was deported from Mexico last week.
Ethan Couch was driving drunk and speeding near Fort Worth in June 2013 when he crashed into a disabled SUV, killing four people and injuring several others, including passengers in his pickup truck. McConnell’s close friend, youth pastor Brian Jennings, was killed.
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Nine people were injured, including passengers in Couch’s pickup. Ethan had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit on the night of the crash.
