Loss of Anonymity
I wonder, I guess, whether or not anonymity is a good thing. This past weekend, I think, Erin and I lost a little of our anonymity. Or, more specifically, we realize we may not have had a lot going for us in the realm of anonymity as someone has been lurking around the house for weeks, possibly months, and had to be run off.
As expected, when we started talking to people about it, the members of the community banded together and, many independent of each other, began sharing information about a man that grew up in the area, married a woman, settled down, and then divorced (leaving her in the house they’d lived in). He is, simply, not a good man. Not bad enough that he has spent any significant time in jail, but bad enough that he is familiar with the county jail, being booked, and trying to find loopholes around which he can try and hide within the law.
According to the people we live around, this man has been a perpetual peeping tom from the time he was little until now. He finds someone he can watch and then pushes all boundaries until he has broken through them. He demands things from people. He is the neighbor who everyone thinks is the one stealing from them when things begin to disappear. And, according to one of the people we spoke with, he believes that this man has been coming around, tripping circuits on lights, and stealing things he’s got around his acreage at night.
This is the kind of person who poaches and feels that he has a right to hunt where he wants, what he wants, when he wants and then not have to suffer any consequences for his actions.
This is the kind of person who believes that the world owes him something, even though he has used and taken and never given back. His family (his family, not brothers and sisters, parents, etc., his children and ex-wife) have been on welfare for years. They demand that people loan them cars, give them things and money, provide them with jobs, and take and take and take.
We were told that this man got so involved with a woman he was watching and stalking that he’d imagined himself her husband and then attacked her real husband for being with her.
He’s had restraining orders out against him by his wife and children.
What makes this very frustrating to me is that one side effect of all this is fear. Extreme, nearly uncontrollable, fear. I wish there were a way to remove the fear and anxiety about strangers in the neighborhood, people that everyone knows, from my wife, our neighbors upstairs, but, you know, its there. My being home doesn’t, necessarily, resolve things.
We did go to the police today and spoke to an officer about what our neighbors told us. We do have on record that it is this man. We did a Google search for the man and found arrest records (Utah County) going back years. And, as everyone (including the officer who immediately knew who the man was) has said, he looks very distinct. We’ve seen pictures. Neither of us care to actually ever meet the guy.
We were told to immediately call 9-1-1 and the officers on that shift would know if they get a call in the area they are looking for this man.
Erin has asked me to hang a new door complete with new lock on the top of our stairs. We are pricing a motion sensor light for the backyard. We blocked viewable access to our house by covering all of the windows.
You know, I wrote about anonymity online and I maintain that the stand I’ve taken, being visible, letting people know me online, is still the right course. Some people would have to go seriously out of their way to find me, the cost (in money) is most likely not worth it. However, when you move the idea of some pervert off of the internet where they can follow their depravities online and out of the view of the public and into the realm of someone in our yard, looking through our windows, listening to us, watching, then privacy and anonymity becomes even more important.
The thing that gets me, the thing that is true, is something Erin said the other night, if it weren’t for her, if it was just me, I wouldn’t have to worry about things like this and I wouldn’t think twice about it. My life, by the simple act of getting married, has changed drastically and now I wake up periodically at night wondering if I woke up because Erin made a noise, because I wake up often, or because I heard something somewhere and need to check it out, or if I just need to go to the bathroom.
I know that all of this will, eventually, pass by. That this man will move on when he can’t get whatever show he was trying to watch anymore, when we make it impossible to be anonymous in the yard, but until then… and until Erin starts to feel comfortable enough to walk alone outside at night, and probably beyond all of that, I get to worry about her, about freaks who don’t even live in our neighborhood anymore, and about a whole host of other things that need worrying about.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
Real Heroes Fly