I spent Christmas of this year in Dallas and not in Los Angeles as I had previously claimed in this blog. The reason for the deception was, as I mentioned in the Dec. 7th post, I had received death threats from my girlfriend’s loser ex-boyfriend. I did not feel they were credible, but by the same token, I wanted to try to ensure as much safety as I could for ex-wife and daughter who were going to be visiting. It’s one thing to feel that death threats aren’t to be taken seriously when your life is potentially at risk; it’s another to do so when the lives of others who are staying under the same roof are also at risk. So I opted for a bit of deception.
Not that it really did me much good. We already had travel plans to be out of town when the hearing was scheduled for. So we had to go before the court and ask for a new hearing date. Many times in these matters you fill out the form and the bailiff takes it straight to the judge; you don’t get a chance to interact with the judge directly as part of your request. To help remedy this, we attached a declaration to the request. A declaration is a statement signed under penalty of perjury. The format we used was as follows:
DECLARATION OF SOMEONE
1. I am someone who is currently appearing before the court in regards to somecase. If called upon to testify I could and would testify as follows:
2.
3.
4.
Signed under penalty of perjury for the State of California in _______ County on this ___ Day of December, 2008.
You just fill in the numbered items with what you’re testifying to. Auby, my girlfriend, filled out the declaration with the facts that she was traveling to Dallas on the date of the hearing. The judge granted the request, but the declaration was attached to the reissued restraining order and was now part of the document that required it to be served to Jackass the stalker. This meant that we would be serving him with proof that we would be in town. Ah well. So much for that plan.
I was also pondering acquiring a firearm for the holidays, but was never like having the combination of firearms and children around. If I did pick one, I’d half to favor one such as a Beretta 9mm which has three safeties. There have been incidents where a police officer loses his firearm to a perpetrator, but the perpetrator could not work the safeties on the gun and instead threw the gun down and fled. You don’t read of those kind of incidents happen with something like a Glock 9m, which has no safeties. In fact, here’s a video of a police officer shooting himself in the foot with his own Glock; safeties are a good thing.
Firearms are ultimately rather risky devices. They can be useful in repelling attackers, but also cause unintended harm and even death. I decided against retaining a firearm because I weighted the remote possibility of unintended harm outweighing the also remote possibility of actually being attacked by Jackass the Stalker. In making this decision, I might be somewhat prejudice because I had my own incident with a firearm growing up. A 12-gauge shotgun was accidentally discharged in my direction as I walked across the room. I felt the blast against my back as it rushed past me, and bore through the kitchen cabinet door. The blast went on to bore a hole through the three of the thin-separator walls of the trailer we stayed in when we were hunting. I got lucky.
I didn’t want to take another chance, so I opted to just to trust in the cowardice of the person who was threatening me. Not that I didn’t first try other resources. Auby and I stayed in touch with the police at the university Jackass was attending. The first time we called in to the police we informed them that one of their students had violated his retraining order. This prompted the police department to open an investigation into the doings of Jackass, and that meant that one particular police office had been assigned to the case. This officer became our point of contact with the university police.
The officer in question had actually spoken with Jackass; he had gotten spooked when he first got served by the restraining order and took it upon himself to go talk to the police to tell them that he was completely innocent of what he was obviously guilty of. That was actually a really bad move on his part, because lying to authorities is a felony- just ask Martha Stuart. Not that he has been arrested and charged with one, but he just dug himself deeper into a hole by going to the police of his own accord and lying to them. In so doing, he committed a crime far more serious than the one he was trying to avoid. He also merely served to arouse the suspicions of the officer in charge of the case.
We started a relationship between the officer in charge of the case and ourselves. We continued to document when he would contact us and we would always forward this information to the officer in charge. He seemed to want to make an arrest of get a subpoena to confiscate his computer and have it reviewed by a computer expert, by all the district attorneys involved seemed to busy to waste the their time on this case. That’s a shame, because it would have been nice to have Jackass confronted by the police and found out for the liar that he is. As it was, I merely had to place my faith in the cowardice that I knew ran deep in him. It had always been part of his modus operandi to be meek in person but say horrible thing over the internet. I could see no reason why now would be any different.
Christmas was wonderful. Jackass contacted us several times and, in cooperation with law enforcement, we encouraged him to reveal himself more and more. We put this evidence in a useful format so that Auby could readily refer to the parts she needed when the hearing arrived. On that fateful day, Jackass was a no show- as we had well expected. In the case where only one of the parties shows up, the court almost always sides with the other party, and so it was with us. Our temporary restraining order was made into a permanent (well, 2 years anyway) protective order.
The next step is to get this California Protective Order domesticated into the State of Texas so that his name will be entered into the Texas law enforcement databases. I’ll let you know how that proceeds.