As luck would have it (if you can call it that), jury duty is postponed until next Monday. There is a number I have to call this Friday for “further instructions” regarding same because it may also be postponed from Monday to another day, and so on. Ah, the court system! Having not worked in an attorney’s office for a while, I had forgotten about these little irritating postponements and the dragging out of such matters. I just hope they get this over with before September when I’m due to go to New Orleans. I have other appointments set this month too, like seeing my eye doctor and my dentist, which I really don’t want to postpone another couple of months due to jury duty. It would be nice if the postponements were because the jail was empty of criminals and nothing was on the docket. Darn those trouble makin’ weasels, anyway!
Speaking of weasels, a local boy that used to spend a lot of time in our home with my stepson fell in with a group of boys back in 2001 that dealt OxyContin. To make matters worse, he not only became addicted to the drug, he joined the other boys in robbing over 17 homes in our neighborhood to support their habit, some 2 and 3 times over! He and another guy from his gang robbed us twice in the same week during the summer of 2002. They staked us out from his grandfather’s house just across and down the street, and knew when we left and arrived home. We immediately suspected this boy and his friends because of all the new cars with such young faces driving them parked at his granddad's all the time, coupled with the fact that we knew those kids couldn't afford vehicles like that. We filed two police reports and listed the missing items, etc. I found some of our things at a pawnshop in another county and this boy’s signature was on file as having been the one who pawned them.
Their first robbery was on a Monday morning after we'd left home. They jimmied the door on our separate building and grabbed my band equipment and some of my husband's tools. On Friday that same week, they hit the house and took jewelry and other valuables. Although this kid had not been in our house since he and my stepson graduated high school and our boy left for college, he still remembered what we had and where to find it. The odd thing was neither we nor the police found any forced entry into our house by door or window, so we weren’t sure how he got in until he explained during confession. Now if you have ever seen someone who abuses OxyContin, it ruins their appetite for food and causes them to lose weight, right down to skin and bone. This boy had gotten so skeletal that he actually crawled through the pet door installed on our garage door, and then once inside the garage, he crawled through the little wood-passing door into the den.
There’s a lot more to this, including how we helped the police gather evidence on those guys, and then how the police let some of them out of jail on a deal to help them get the others and how that went sour, but to make a long story short, I’ll just say that those boys practically terrorized everyone in a 7-mile vicinity for months! People were putting their homes up for sale, sleeping with their guns under their pillow, etc. Our quiet little country road where we didn’t need to lock our doors became what we had only read about happening in large cities. In the end, some of us, including myself, did present our evidence and press charges and about half of them were caught and sentenced to 3-years minus time already served, which wasn’t much. The robberies and drug trafficking on our road did die down, although there’s still some traffic at the boy’s grandfather’s house about one day a week. (They should know that if they can see us, we can see them too!)
The boy, which is now a 25-year old man, was just recently released from the Penitentiary after serving his time on 7 counts (I think) of robbery. During his residency there, he wrote my husband and me a letter of apology for his crime against us, and acknowledged how well we treated him growing up. It seemed real, I felt bad for him, but the other choice besides prison, and the rehab offered there such as it is, was parole with home confinement and outpatient treatment, which there is no clinic of sorts around here. To send him home to his mother, (who lives on up the street from her dad, the boy's grandad, and is herself a prescription drug zombie) or his granddad (who let them use his house as a base of operations) would have been like tossing the boy back into the fire. There were new charges against him by the State Police but I’m not sure what happened there. It may turn out that that will be a new case before the jury, and if it’s the one I’m to serve on, I don’t think I’ll be allowed to hear it because his attorney could argue I’m prejudiced due to his previous crime against me. Coincidentally, 3 of the times our phone has rang in the last 8 days, the caller hangs up before the 2nd or 3rd ring. Our Caller ID shows it’s the number of the boy’s mother, with whom he is supposedly staying now. And of whom just attached a “For Sale” sign to her home. For some reason, I don’t think she’s calling to ask me to list her house. Hmmm…
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