Sunday, July 19, 2015
Well, that was short-lived. On the eighth day home around 4:30 p.m, I received a call from my niece. She was checking on Mary Grace’s house for me and found someone had gone in through the back door, busted into John Brooks’ shop and the shop door was still wide open. I told her to call 911 and to let me know what happened. She did, and the 911 operator told her that Woodstock Police could not respond because they had a lot of calls. She waited there until she got a call from none other than Officer Lightsey. He asked her what was missing, and she told him she did not know because she did not know what was there originally. She explained how she found the property when she arrived. He told her the property owner was responsible for calling the police. (Does this mean if you see someone’s house burning down you should wait and have the homeowner call?) For all they knew, the perpetrator could still have been there. Whenever you were at the house, you never knew whether someone was hiding in the woods watching you.
My niece explained that her Aunt Reta was in Florida and asked her to check on the property. Officer Lightsey then asked, “Where is Mary Grace?” She said, “I guess in Florida with Aunt Reta.” He did not come to the property and, as far as I know, never filed a report. I asked her to remove all the light bulbs and to secure the shop door the best she could.
On Tuesday we got the call about Tyler hauling off the yellow bus. The person who called saw him leading the way for the wrecker service. Charlie called Attorney Downs for counsel and was told once again to secure the property. (They made that sound so easy.) He did say he was going to call City Hall to make sure that Officer Lightsey filed a report about my niece’s call on Sunday.
Meanwhile, I called the assistant district attorney in Centerville and was told, in so many words, that “Bibb County had bigger fish to fry.” I asked for suggestions on how to stop this from happening and was told that if they knew the answer to that, it would solve a lot of problems. I am not stupid. I understand this was small beans to the police. But it was MY BEANS, and I thought everyone deserved to be protected by the law. Come on, help me build a case here, file a report, do something, please!
We took the next step in securing the property: We hired an off-duty police officer. Guess what? On his way to the property, he had to respond to a call and never made it to Mary Grace’s. Something else that bothers me, is whether it was a just coincidence that after Officer Lightsey found out I was in Florida, his good friend Tyler just happened to start hauling items off the property. Just saying.
Ok. Let’s keep talking,
Reta
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