It was about this time, today, five years ago, on May 27, 2005, that an Unforeseen event shattered the life of my son. He was the victim of a home invasion robbery. He was ten years old at the time.
It was an ordinary day. My son, Joshua, and had recently been taken off restriction. My sweet, silly, innocent boy had thrown all his homework away a month previously to try and hide some poor grades. Kids: Do they think their parents are morons? Well, some parents ARE. Anyway, for this transgression, I took his PlayStation away for a month. When I took it away, I really took it away: I unplugged the damn thing and locked it away in my closet. I am by no means a "Gamer," and was unable to hook the damn thing up again! Shit. Josh was flipping out. He asked if I would call his Dad, my 'X,' Nick, to see if he could spend the night.
(Note: My X-husband and I have been estranged since Joshua was 18 months old. He was a Meth addict. But that's a post for another day. Suffice to say, I absquatulated with Josh when he was an infant to get him out of that environment...)
In Northern California, where we live, it is now 8:34pm, PST. It was at this precise time, five years ago, that I loaded Josh, jammies and his favorite games to take him to spend the night with his father. Nick lived in a very shady, (and I don't mean lack of sunlight), neighborhood. Really, NO where to raise a child. There is a park, kitty corner to Nick's house, called Webber Park. It is south of North Van Buren Street.
It is notorious for everything from drunks, urinating in public, pimps, prostitution, drug dealers, users, junkies, thieves and gang bangers. One summer some nut with an AK-47 fired off a blur of rounds in the park. When I ran to see what happened, everyone was on their stomachs, mothers covering children, the elderly and miscellaneous miscreants. The gunman was easy to spot: HE was the only person still standing.
Another advantage of Webber Park is that it has a perfect view of the houses on North Van Buren Street. A person can sit in the park and watch the comings and goings of the residents of the homes and apartments on the block. Which is apparently what happened only two days, at Nick's apartment, just prior to the home invasion.
A couple of days earlier, when my husband returned home from 'work,' he was startled by two men running down the stairs from his tri-plex. It was broad daylight. Two guys had broken into a second floor bedroom window, in the apartment my husband lived in. The apartment my husband owns is a tri-plex. There are two 'Shotgun' apartments downstairs, and Nick lived on the top floor on top of both shotguns. Built in 1906. He had renovated it. But as far as security went, well, there was none. So, when they heard Nick come home, they knocked him down the stairs, as they fled.
All right. That was a scare. In retrospect, it should have flipped a switch in my brain: DO NOT TAKE YOUR PRECIOUS SON OVER THERE UNTIL SOME KIND OF SECURITY MEASURES WERE PUT IN PLACE. I think on this a lot. For the last goddamned five years. Every day I think: I could have prevented this; I should have known better; I was not vigilant enough; I was an idiot. Everyday I have these thoughts. All the time. I take A LOT of meds to shut those thoughts down. But they don't work.
When I got to work the next day I told a co-worker of mine about the 'mini-breakin.' She and her husband were welders. And the very next day, FOR FREE, they began to weld an iron gate and other grating to bar any intruders from the house. But, unknown to all of us: it would not, could not, be finished in time. But that's the bitch about the Unforeseen: You never see it coming...
Digression Break: When Nick and I lived together at the Van Buren house, way before Josh was a twinkle in anyone's eye, I had a reoccurring nightmare: Two men would break-in the bedroom window, (the SAME one they had broken into two days before), and in this dream I was trying to protect someone. But I could never SEE who that 'someone' was. I had this dream over and over again. Now I KNOW who I was protecting, but at the time, Nick just told me, "Its just a damn dream. Get over it. Nothing will happen." SO, ...
That evening in May, it was very warm. My husband usually kept the front door open, with only a rickety, rusty old screen door as a the only barrier between 'just a normal warm evening,' and 'chaos; the Unforeseen. (I've always been more 'paranoid' than Nick).
This was a bone of contention between he and I. When we all lived at the Van Buren house, all doors and windows were shut and I did not give a damn how fucking high the AC bill is. I had that dream in my mind. And I had figured out that the person in my dream I was supposed to protect was my son. My husband, on the other hand, didn't seem to worry about that. That was a colossal goat fuck of a parenting dispute that I would ultimately be 'right' about. But there's no consolation in being right, my friends.
______________________________________________________________________________May 27th, 2005: After dropping Josh off at his dad's house, I went home to my apartment in Lodi.
Later I would be so thankful that I had that apartment.
At about 11:45pm, as I was going to sleep, my phone rang. On the other end was a cop: Officer David Abrose. He told me that two men with guns had broken into my husbands house. A home invasion robbery had occurred. I had to come immediately. And he hung up. I did not even have the chance to ask if my son were ALIVE. And that was a unknowing obsession shredding my psyche. In my mind, the fact that he had said NOTHING about my son meant Josh WAS dead. The adrenaline immediately hit my system like a prickly, itchy, fire all over my body. I felt like my entire being was on fire. My mind was on fire. On the drive down to Stockton, my mind was racing with thoughts of my son, dead, in the middle of a crime scene.
And those were the thoughts racing through my mind as I was speeding towards Stockton. My dream had come true. WHO would have imagined that? How could you? And there was nothing at the time that I could do or say or effect in any way whatsoever to 'control' the unknown fate of my son. My mind kept repeating a cruel mantra: "You are driving to a crime scene. Expect the worst. I don't believe in hope. I have no God I trust or believe in that can comfort me. It wouldn't make me feel any better if there were, because what kind of god would let this happen?" (God and I have never been on very good terms. He's got issues).
Home Invasion Robberies happen everyday. I'm not going to rattle off the dismal statistics. It's too depressing. But they happen every minute. All over the US. Home Invasion Robberies have the ignominious distinction of being almost impossible to solve. Because the perps are not in the home for a long period of time, they leave less evidence behind to aid in their capture and prosecution.
But the worst aspect of a Home Invasion Robbery is that a victim's chance of making it out alive are very slim.
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I arrive at the house. Cop cars, lights, fire trucks, an ambulance, all scattered around the house. I go upstairs and this is what I saw:
Blood, copious amounts on the floor and splattered on one wall. Bullet holes in the Murphy bed I spent 856 hours restoring, shattered glass, detritus of a most violent nature.
The Officer said my husband was at Dameron with undisclosed head wounds.
I asked him about Joshua: :"Is my son alive?"
Yes, Josh was alive. That's all I could think of at that time. To be honest. I wasn't concerned about my husband at all. Think what you will.
I caught sight of Josh when I saw another Officer coming out of Josh's room, helping him gather some things to take home, because he would never set foot in that house again.
By this time, it was almost midnight. I gathered up Joshua and went to Dameron Hospital, to wait for Nick. He had been pistol whipped about the head, and only required a few stitches. I took Joshua home to Lodi, and Nick returned to Van Buren to get some things, because he was coming to stay at my apartment for awhile.
He would, however, eventually have to go back to North Van Buren Street. This incident was not a 'marriage fixer.' It was an incident that would turn into a ganglion cyst that would separate a father from his son forever.
I end Part One at about the time, 12:30 to 1am, PST, that I brought Joshua back home to the safety of our home in Lodi.
Post Script: Since that night 5 years ago, my son has never been back to Stockton, or the home of his father, in which the invasion took place. He has not seen his father in over a year, and never wants to see him again. The reasons for this will be continued in Part Two.
To be continued...
End Part One
