methamphetamine

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I can’t tell you where I got this story, but I have confirmed that every bit of it is true. It might sound like a plot for a novel or the start of a Hollywood screenplay, but it’s not. It’s real. It is the story of a home invasion that lasted almost three months. Here goes:

Marty (not his real name) was a struggling government worker striving to gain certification for a certain type of job. He was working temporarily at his state job while training and studying for this certificate. This took up a lot of time including a couple nights a week for special classes.

Marty’s wife also worked, and the parents had a 16-year-old teenage boy at home.

Soon, the boy, George, befriended a guy he saw standing around on a nearby street corner most days. He was tall, bald, with a moustache, and covered with a variety of tattoos, including some that labeled him a Nazi. The guy said his name was Adam and he had long since separated from being a white supremacist, but that the huge tattoos would be hard to remove.

Adam didn’t have any place to sleep. He had just been released from youth-authority prison and had zero money and nowhere to go. George’s parents were away and wouldn’t be back until the next day. Adam stayed the night, sleeping on a sofa.

When Marty and his wife Louise returned, they were taken aback to see that Adam had stayed the night and that he planned on setting up a camp in the garage to stay for a few days. Louise didn’t seem to mind and Marty was too busy working 60-hour weeks and going to school to care.

Now Adam was a decent guy trying to make a comeback, but he had a weakness for beer and started buying it by the case. Or at least he said he bought it. He was actually stealing it in all manner of ways from stores, individuals and even burglarizing nearby homes.

While Marty and Louise were out, Adam made himself at home and recruited George to run errands for him. These errands simply were to deliver certain bags, pouches and boxfuls of stuff from one address to the next. George never knew what was in the carriers and never asked. Adam paid him $10 to $20 per trip, and George was pulling in some serious scratch. He was becoming quite the popular man on campus at his high school.

Now when Marty and Louise would arrive home, everything seemed great. The house was kept up well by Adam, and he was very polite, especially to Louise. Marty, though a little concerned about this house guest, let everything stay the way it was for a while.

During the workdays with parents gone and George in school, Adam would invite guests over – very strange-looking people not from the surrounding neighborhood. They would visit, perhaps have a drink or two, and run more “errands� for Adam. At least a dozen or so of Adams “friends� would end up circulating through the house and people were in and out at all times of the day and night.

Now this was disconcerting for Marty and Louise, but they couldn’t do much about it. The visitors were always impeccably polite and were very, very quiet when visiting during the night. Daytimes, though, tended to be a little more boisterous because nobody was around except for Adam and his endless string of associates walking through the house and making themselves at home.

Little by little, more and more people actually started spending the night there. It became a flophouse for local homeless. Marty and Louise couldn’t really do anything, and the few times that tempers flared, police were called in, but the police had as much anger against Marty and Louise as they did the interlopers. The cops just said the couple had to clear out all these guests if peace were return to the house and surrounding block.

It wasn’t that simple, Adam became a little more threatening, and then articles started to come up missing from the house. Spare change, a fancy ash tray, a microwave – then a laptop computer. Marty exploded over this and almost got into a fearful fight with Adam. Police were called in again and Adam was “evicted.�

But the damage had been done and the seed planted. A really nice next-door neighbor, Larry, who had gone out of his way to befriend Adam and his contingent, saw what was going on and started to send out red flags about the people. Next night, somebody set Larry’s truck on fire in front of his garage.

A nearby elementary school was set on fire soon thereafter, and then a big bonfire was discovered burning near the back of Larry’s house.

Police tried to pin down George and his teen pals for all the fire business, but it was later learned that Adam caused the chaos in order to instill fear in Marty, Louise and Larry and maintain a hold over this part of the block.

Drugs were part of the picture – mostly methamphetamine, and it was later learned that the house had become a distribution point for meth. During the ensuing struggle, Adam co-opted George and Louise and pitted them against Marty, who was driven out of the house completely. Marty then went to work trying to get Adam and company out of the house. George had become a full-blown teen crook under Adam’s control, and ended up stealing a shotgun from Larry’s house. George then stole one of Marty’s cars and was on his way to another location with a loaded shotgun, which he had sawed off.

It was at that point that Marty collected evidence against his son George at several locations, had the police arrest George and lock him up at the county juvenile hall for 60 days on the sawed-off gun charges, among others. With George safely out of harm’s way, Marty went to work, cooperated with local police, had Adam and his other perps arrested, and the whole group was put in prison for several months on a variety of charges.

Marty then moved to an undisclosed location to escape retribution from Adam and his con buddies when they got out of the can, and Louise and George were moved out of the town, later out of state, to keep this disaster from repeating itself.

The preceding was a sanitized version of events. Things were actually much worse and much more desperate for all involved, but I think the point is made. A home invasion can last more than a few hours – in can last months.

Don’t let it happen to you.

Project Seek: Onassis, Kennedy and the Gemstone Thesis

There’s More Where This Came From

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