“She will be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year”, Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson said in a telephone interview. She is charged with hindering the apprehension of a felon.
Couch arrived in Texas on Thursday after a Los Angeles judge approved her extradition more than a week after Mexican authorities detained mother and son in a Pacific resort town.
Tonya Couch, the mother of “affluenza teen” Ethan Couch, has been released from the Tarrant County, TX jail, according to CNN affiliate KTVT.
Salvant imposed tight restrictions, including Global Positioning System monitoring, drug and alcohol tests and weekly check-ins.
A Tarrant County judge reduced her bond from $1 million to $75,000 on Monday after hearing that the government has frozen Couch’s bank account, leaving her essentially broke, reports NBC 5. The teen – who is on probation for killing four people in a 2013 drunk driving incident – remained jailed in Mexico as efforts to extradite him grind on.
Defense lawyers for Couch successfully argued that Ethan was coddled by wealthy parents and lacked a sense of responsibility for his actions. Both were taken into custody later that month in Puerto Vallarta, after a call for pizza delivery tipped off authorities to their whereabouts.
“There is no denying the nation’s frustration that Ethan Couch hasn’t been held accountable”, MADD National President Colleen Sheehey-Church said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon. Four people were killed in the June 2013 wreck.
Anderson told reporters on Monday there was a possibility Tonya Couch could flee again. Ethan Couch remains in a Mexico City detention facility.
Despite all of the previous testimony about the teen’s wealthy upbringing, his mother’s attorneys argued she had few assets to her own name and couldn’t pay the cost of a $1 million bond.
In early December, it was reported that Ethan Couch and his mother had gone missing in the wake of a video of the teen drinking beer, breaking his probation conditions, surfacing on the Internet.
Officials in Tarrant County said that the bond amount was set so high because they feared that Couch was a flight risk.
In consideration of those concerns, Tonya Couch’s bail conditions will be onerous.