Wheels of Justice, Part I

It’s pretty surreal. I’m sitting at the county court house waiting for a case to be called for which I am the victim. The noon o’clock hour marks three hours of sitting in a beautiful turn-of-the-century “hallway” in 1970’s office furniture with quite an eclectic group of people. Today’s date marks 1 year and 13 days of becoming victim of this crime.

The crime? Appliance Theft. In the scheme of things, this falls higher on the travesty scale than the tragedy scale. But still, I’m out $1000 and quite a bit of time in the eviction process, civil suits and now criminal hearings. Not to mention the concern over personal property, personal safety and everything else any landlord suffers through when their tenant turns on them.

Here’s the first lesson: never be a landlord. We are landlords for a higher calling and purpose; some folks must make money on this kind of thing. We don’t. I’ll have to explain that higher calling and purpose at some other time. This is the story of “Holly”.

Holly was in a tough spot. She and her three kids were living with her folks and “between jobs”. She wanted to get her feet back on the ground and focus on raising her children. She secured gainful employment and, in a serious streak of compassion, we thought we would be able to help her out. Here’s the second lesson: there is a line somewhere between being compassionate and being a doormat. You can get burned, but I’ll still err on the side of compassion. Jesus did.

I love giving folks a second chance, an opportunity to improve their situation and their lives. Certainly, you have to enter into such endeavors with both wisdom and prayer. You don’t just invite anyone into your house (have you ever seen The Lost Boys?). Holly had all of the makings of someone who was ready to turn her life around, she could have been and still could be a New Creation.

And she did quite well… for the first eight or nine months. Then, her boyfriend got out of jail. His existence and situation never came up in conversation. Holly immediately assumed her role as victim. It was sad to watch how someone could suffer such abuse. And even harder to see them call this love.

The situation became increasingly difficult and the environment became downright scary. The physical property suffered (damaged walls, broken doors, busted windows) but so did my reputation through their obnoxious, loud, illegal and illicit activities. This all started around the April timeframe but really hit stride in June when some 5-7 adults and 3 children were living in a two bedroom townhouse. At that point, I thought “she only has 6 weeks left on the lease, she’ll have to move out and I won’t need to go through a difficult eviction process.” All the while, trying to balance the safety of the property, my neighbors and my family.

Lesson Three: tenant’s have more rights than landlords…. “they ain’t gotta move out”. So began an arduous three-month eviction process that ended with over $4000 in damages including the theft of all the appliances in the townhouse. The only criminal activity in the whole lot of it that I had a chance of proving was the theft of the appliances. We decided to purse all of the civil and criminal action we could. I’ll post the outcomes at a later date.