I recognize that I am not the best person to tell this story. Frankly, anyone else would be better suited to expose this kind of thing. My credibility is instantly called into question by nature of my disability. I am a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. I'm properly medicated and treatment compliant. My symptoms have been in remission for the better part of ten years. As such, I am technically sane on paper. Even still, if I attempted to make a public spectacle of this, it wouldn't be long before someone pointed out that I'm certifiably delusional.
I live alone in a small one-bedroom house in a bad neighborhood. The city had an auction on abandoned properties a few years back and I ended up fetching this house for ten dollars after promising to fix it up and live in it for at least five years. Before my psychotic break I worked construction to pay my way through college. That experience combined with the miniscule amount of money I receive in Supplemental Security income allowed me to install aluminum siding, new carpets and new drywall over the course of the first year. In a neighborhood of graffiti and gang violence my tiny fenced in yard is attached to a quaint single bedroom apartment that has the distinction of being its own building.
A couple years back I got a job online via the Ticket to Work program. It allows me to keep my insurance and a portion of my SSI while working for the majority of my income. It has been a lifesaver. Living on seven hundred dollars a month and food stamps was a level of poverty that was as dehumanizing as it is unbearable. The extra money goes a long way towards giving me a quality of life comparable to most men my age. I work as a human data processor. There is a call center in Pasadena, CA that has a thousand guys doing data entry for a medical billing firm. My job is to check each form for errors and send them through for processing. Most days, I don't even wear pants.
I'm not agoraphobic. I could leave the house if I wanted to. I just don't want to. I haven't been outside my yard for nearly seven months. My groceries are delivered. My bills are paid online. My doctor agrees to have our monthly sessions via Skype. I order my cigarettes in bulk from a warehouse in New Jersey. I buy my beer by the pallet. If society were to fall tomorrow, I have enough supplies to ride it out for the next three years. But enough about me.
This about what is happening in my neighborhood.
With the exception of a few neighbor women who stop by on occasion, I don't tend to interact with the neighborhood. I have iron bars on all of the windows and doors. My windows are triple paned tempered glass. My steel door and frame are welded to rebar that lines every outer wall of the house in a thatch woven grid of protection. There is a lot of gun violence in my neighborhood. It's quite likely that I am the only person in my neighborhood with gainful employment. Thieves have tried to get into my house before. Because of this there are cameras on every corner of my house. There are no blind spots.
I can see every angle of the outside from my home office. Sometimes at night I flip on night vision mode and watch the neighborhood. For a long time now if someone was shot and an ambulance showed up, I was the guy that called. On more than one occasion I've forwarded video files to the police showing a shooting or a mugging that happened. Jeanette visits me twice a month as a result. It saved her life.
Jeanette is a sixty year old woman who would be a grandmother if she had ever had children. Her husband is the pastor of a Baptist church down the street. One Sunday night while leaving with the proceeds of the collection plate she was robbed at gunpoint and shot. They took her cellphone. If she had been left there much longer she probably would have bled out, but with proper medical treatment she was home in a few days.
Jeanette comes by occasionally with baked goods and always invites me to church. I politely decline each time and she graciously accepts. Her niece Vertasha is a little closer to my age. She needed a job and I ended up hiring her to clean my house twice a week. She gets a hundred bucks and I get a small amount of social interaction. Vertasha and her best friend Tamiqua stop by to hang out once and a while. I tried dating Tamiqua for a while, but my aversion to leaving the house put a strain on the relationship and these days we're just friends.
For the past few days Vertasha and Tamiqua have refused to leave my house. They're scared and rightfully so. There have been six murders in the last two weeks and the police aren't even attempting to make it look like they are investigating. One of the bodies sat outside on the sidewalk for eight hours before a squad car showed up. Six women have been assaulted and stabbed in the past two weeks and the police response thus far has been one of cleanup. To serve and protect tends to have a socioeconomic price tag.
If any of these killings had taken place in range of my cameras, I would post the footage on LiveLeak and try to get the whole urban protest thing going. Unfortunately, this killer is either aware of my field of vision or has had the uncanny luck of operating just outside of them. Tamiqua saw one of the killings happen. She described a tall man in dark clothing and a ski mask. She couldn't make out any more details. If the word around the neighborhood is to be believed, these slayings happen at or around dusk every couple of days. The girls are grabbed on the street and pulled into an alley.
I've tried comforting Tamiqua, but she is all but despondent these days. Vertasha spends the day flipping the news channels looking for any mention of the killer and so far, nothing. The two of them have posted up on my couch. I would ask them to leave, but I know the harsh truth the both face. My house is a fortress, you'd need a tank to get in. Their house has paper thin walls and a door you can pop open with a credit card. I could kick them out, but frankly it's the most consistent social interaction I've had since college.
I ordered some wireless pinhole cameras and a couple of old linksys 54g routers pre-installed with the OpenDDWRT firmware. I had the girls help me set up them up as range extenders and put the cameras up in key locations around the neighborhood during the day. I even went so far as to walk over to Jeanette's porch to help with the installation when my instructions over the phone proved fruitless. I didn't realize how pale I was until stepping out in the sunlight.
With the upgrade to the network I could see the entire neighborhood. There were a few blind spots, but for the most part I could keep a reasonable eye on the neighborhood. I watched with horror as the killer grabbed a girl on my watch. He pulled her from the sidewalk instead of taking her to the alley, he moved effortlessly to one of the blind spots. By the time the police arrived, the body had been mutilated like the others.
Vertasha and Tamiqua swore up and down that the didn't tell anyone where the cameras were. Just to make sure I changed the encryption routine on the network and moved the pinhole cameras myself. For an added layer of security I changed the permissions on the network so that only my mac address and local IP could access the main router. This was after changing both. This was twice in two days I had left my house for an extended period of time. The neighbors started to notice. Before long I had ten angry gangbangers shouting outside my house.
I knew what they were thinking. Girls were dying and the crazy white guy with all the cameras was suddenly seen outside his house. Vertasha and Tamiqua were yelling out the window when I answered the door. It could have gone hundred different ways, but I was at my wits end and decided to take a chance. The 18th street Gangster Disciples are the only street gang that actually serves a kind of police force around here. Sure, they sell drugs and kill rival gang members in the street, but they also rough up anyone fucking up in the neighborhood. They were the reason that up until very recently that girls could walk down the street at night with a certain degree of safety.
I invited them in.
D-Loc, the neighborhood regent and leader of the posse gathering in my yard pulled a gun on my while Vertasha screamed at him to chill out. He was her ex-boyfriend. After regaining my composure, I invited him back to the office and showed him the video set up. After familiarizing him with the setup and reminded him that despite thousands of hour of video, I had not once called the cops on his crew, he told his crew to calm down.
D-Loc and I sat in the living room over beers as we discussed my plan. I had hypothesized that the killer was either hacking into the network or that they were local and watching me set up the cameras. I drew him a map of the blind spots and asked him to keep his soldiers in positions they could easily check them in an emergency. After agreeing to shoot him a text if I saw any 27th Street Black Disciples in the area, we brokered a deal. I'm not proud of it, but in one night I went from paranoid shut-in to assisting a semi-organized criminal organization. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The killings all but stopped for several weeks. The bastard had been working at a pace of a kill every couple of days to not operating at all. Things died down and the neighborhood was in the first stages of starting to relax when I got a text from one of the soldiers concerning a black unmarked Crown Victoria with out of state plates they had seen cruising around the neighborhood. With help from D-Loc I was able to get a few more cameras and expand the range of the network to cover his whole territory. At the expense of setting him up with ability to watch the feeds in his living room, I was able to set up a camera network where the only blind spots were inside the individual residences.
The black Crown Victoria parked halfway down an alley and the driver, a white male, approximately six-foot three and two-hundred pounds proceeded to walk around to the trunk of the car where he produced a black turtleneck, a ski mask and a knife. As he got dressed to kill I texted D-Loc and in less than two minutes I was watching twenty gangsters descend on the bastard that had been terrorizing the neighborhood. Then something unexpected happened, the police rolled up in force. I shot a text to D-Loc telling them to pull out, but it was two late. Five of his men were shot, ten were arrested and the rest scattered. In one night our neighborhood coverage went from regular patrols and CCTV to being undermanned.
The man in the black turtleneck didn't flee. When the cops arrive he produced a gun and a badge and proceeded to join in the shootout. I sat there at my desk boiling in anger at the revelation that the killer was a police officer. It all fell into place and made sense. As I stared at this man with burning hatred he looked directly at the nearest camera and pulled a single finger to his lips, motioning for me to “Ssh!”
I had been backing up my video archive to a stack external hard drives that I was at that very moment shoving into a shoebox and hiding in a lock box I had built into the floorboards under my refrigerator. After putting it back into place and making sure the grooves in the carpet lined up perfectly I went through the futile effort of trying to purge the information from my system.
When the police couldn't knock down my door with a battering ram, they brought in a tank with a battering ram attached. Then came the SWAT and tear gas. I was tackled to the ground and handcuffed. After a vicious beating at the hands of the arresting officers, I was thrown in the back of the police car. I was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, unauthorized public surveillance, resisting arrest about about a hundred other trumped up charges. I wasn't give a phone call. When I asked for a lawyer I was punched in the face. I was eventually tossed into general population.
Three months passed without so much as arraignment. It was only after getting one of D-Loc's cousins that was getting out on a furlough to pass a note to a lawyer that a Writ of Habeas Corpus was filed and after a bunch of shouting in the courtroom by the judge, that I was released without being charged. My lawyer encouraged me to sue and that litigation is pending. D-Loc and his crew weren't so lucky.
In the three months that I had been incarcerated there has been fifteen murders. The police ended up hitting D-Loc's house with a swat team and he went down in the firefight. The vacuum of power allowed the 27th Street BD's to move into the neighborhood. Not only did the slayings continue, but now there was a dealer on every corner and Vertasha had been hooked on crack and turned out as a hooker. Jeanette was in shambles.
All of my computer equipment was ransacked and my house was in disrepair. I got a notice from the city stating that I failed a routine inspection and that I would be forced to vacate the premises within thirty days for breaching the land contract. A water pipe burst over the winter and seeped into my hidden lock box corrupting the hard drives. I had nothing to show any proof of the officer I knew to be the killer.
I moved in with Tamiqua. She and I got back together in the wake of everything and while I spend a lot of my time online I grudgingly go to church with her on Sunday and occasionally join her at the bar. I spend hours at a time going through every local Facebook profile I can find looking from the man in the black sweatshirt.
So far I've only found one result, a beat cop for the local police department. His facebook page is set to private, but after cultivating a fake profile of a young woman using Tamiqua's friends list I was able to add him with a couple of risque pictures I pulled from 4chan set as her profile pics. While browsing through his previous status updates I found out that he was at a training retreat for the six weeks the murders didn't happen. His likes included Jack The Ripper, Silence of The Lambs and Dexter.
I can't prove it was him, but it looks enough like what I saw. With everything that I've been through, I'm a little scared to pursue this much further. Sometimes when I leave the house I see a black Crown Victoria following me from a few block away. My lawyer is suing the city for a few million but at the same time the city is suing me for the value of the house I lost as a result of what my lawyer calls attrition through paperwork.
My life is one of fear and paranoia. I tried talking to my doctor about the whole ordeal, but he calls into question my interpretation of events. A byproduct of my diagnosis is that people seldom believe me when I talk about conspiracies and corruption in the local government. I initially tried to get Tamiqua or one of the remaining soldiers from D-Loc's crew to come forward for me, but they have just as much to lose and are just as afraid as I am of what kind of retribution the neighborhood could see next.
The most disheartening thing about all of this is how much I've considered going home. I could move to a better neighborhood in a different town and my troubles would disappear. Unlike everyone else that lives in this community that has become like a family to me, I can leave at any time. I can walk up to you and talk about this and if I don't mention my disability, you'll give me the time of the day. Devon, a local activist that was trying to raise awareness was shot six times during a stop-and-frisk type incident where the police reported to finding a gun and drugs in his bookbag.
He had never even smoked a cigarette and he was a Buddhist. By nature of his socioeconomic status and his appearance, they were able to erase a voice that shouted against them and in the process no one in polite society batted an eye. I tried, I really tried to help but one man can do nothing against this level of institutionalized murder and hatred. A man can kill twenty-two young women over the course of six months and operate with impunity because of the race of his victims and his position on the force.
If this happened in Beverly Hills it would be on every news channel with pundits weighing in. But here in the neighborhood, it is how life works. Tamiqua says I should be careful. She told me that she had been seeing that car when she went to work at the convenience store down the road. What's worse is that the officer in question comes in there at night and lingers in the back before leaving without saying a word. I told her that I would take her with me and that we could move back to my hometown, but she refused to leave her family.
I'm rambling because I'm nervous. The convenience store is only six blocks from here. She was supposed to get off work at 3PM, but it's almost midnight. If I still had my cameras I'd sit here and watch her walk home or go through the footage and try to find her, but the last time I tried to set some up the new ruling gang made it a point beat me within an inch of my life. Looking back at everything that has happened I can do nothing but sit here and worry about Tamiqua.
I wish I lived in a world where all life was as precious as my goddess of a girlfriend. Sadly, I live in a world where the people tasked with protecting us see her as less than human. I can hear sirens in the distance. I hope she comes home soon.
Submitted May 19, 2015 at 10:34AM by blacklivesstilmatter http://ift.tt/1B96GfG nosleep
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