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Shortly after moving to Durham, I was essentially homeless. David and Quillpen were only offering a place to stay temporarily.
I had dated two different people in Wilmington before I left and after the life I had with Lynn. These were not meaningful relationships because I was still in shock from the life I had known with Lynn. You just can't move on that fast. Not having a "home" any longer had not sunk in yet and so I didn't fully sink to the depths of despair and low self-esteem that would follow. I was too shocked.
I was still in love with Lynn and that would NEVER seem to end for decades... decades later, literally, saying goodbye would seem like a radical idea. In fact, in 2024, 24 years after the life we had known ended, saying goodbye seemed like a radical idea that I had to accept.
Somewhere after the events of 9/11, I was asked to leave the residence of David and Quillpen. It had no relationship to the American tragedy. I might have otherwise helped people cope with a traumatic event. However, I was in shock. I couldn't process the events that had happened in my life when I lost Lynn, our home, the life we built and knew, my career.
It wasn't that I didn't care. I just couldn't register these events as events in the way that I had experienced life previously.
How could my life be destroyed by a fraudster pretending to be a therapist and calling himself just a support person?
The best way to characterize my life that began when I moved in with David and Quillpen was that I was couch surfing. For the next few years, I would be couch surfing with different friends and/or living in a homeless shelter. Technically, I had beds in the homes of the friends with whom I resided. They had extra rooms or an extra bed.
At some point, after 9/11/2001, I had been working at the cash register at Eckerd Drugs in Durham. They sold alcohol and I mostly worked in the photo department. Back then people still used film and brought that in for processing. One day I was asked to work the main register.
I was a good target for someone underage wanting to pull one over on someone. I was dealing with extreme anxiety and could basically focus on the date on the license that a young woman showed to me. I assumed that if she was showing a license than she must be confident that she is over 21. You would think that I purposefully bought her alcohol! Yet, I didn't know her and just was over-stressed.
I was given a citation and asked to show up in court. Somehow, I missed the court date. I showed up just slightly late. A warrant was issued for "failure to appear." This should have been at most a fine and then I would move on with my life. Instead, I was put in jail.
This was my first time in jail. It was in Durham. For me, it was traumatic.
I also learned that the "appeal" that I demanded from my lawyer for the matter in Wilmington, when John Freifeld falsely claimed I made several harassing phone calls, had come before the court down in Wilmington, which is included in the New Hanover County Court system.
The public defender had appealed the conviction because I demanded that he do so. It never happened. I never called to harass Freifeld! This public defender couldn't get a continuation until he could locate me. I had been dealing with so much and I was in shock as I have tried to describe. So, informing the lawyer who appealed a guilty conviction that should never have happened, somehow had not occurred to me.
Neither had the citation for selling alcohol accidentally to a minor. I don't want to justify selling to a minor, but I was just blurry-eyed due to stress and made an honest mistake.
Because I still had a relationship with my so-called family, I reached out to them for some kind of support. I had lost Lynn, the home we had, my career, the life I had known. Now, for the first time in my life, the unimaginable happened. I was in jail! Of all the things that I thought could happen in life, being put in jail was not on my radar as something I could imagine in my worst nightmares.
Going to jail for someone who graduates from a town like Southington near the top of the class, never gets in trouble growing up, goes to a prestigious college to get an engineering degree and then continues on to get a graduate degree on their own and build a successful private practice as a therapist... these are not the things that people like us imagine could happen.
I once had a normal life for nearly a decade. I had accomplished so much. I had true love. I had a successful career. I had been president of the local chapter of the society of clinical social workers in New Hanover.
Everything had seemed perfect. A dream comes true!
Until Lynn got sick and then everything else happened at the same time!
After the matter of the citation for selling alcohol to a minor was resolved, I was then taken down to Wilmington.
The statute reads "Buy/Sell Alcohol to a Minor" which implies poor morals and a willingness to corrupt a minor... not that I looked at her license as ID and read it wrong.
Then I failed to appear in court for the appeal on the misdemeanor charge of harassing phone calls – a matter that should have gone nowhere if the public defender had obtained the phone records in a timely fashion showing that no calls were made by me.
Instead, they put me in chains like a violent animal. I was then put in a silver-colored metallic box at the back of a vehicle to be transported to Wilmington, NC where I once lived the happiest days of my life.
Obviously, I reached out to my so-called family that I expected to act like family members. I expected them to act like a mother and father would normally act when their child, their first born, is harmed so profoundly. I expected anger from them at the system and compassion and comfort for me.
Why would I not expect that? Later experiences would show me that I was not actually being treated like my sister, brother and parents would treat a son or sibling.
There is such a thing as scapegoating, but I didn't have the slightest inkling that I was so ostracized by my siblings and my parents that they lost every last sense of compassion or concern for their own flesh and blood! We didn't see eye to eye on many things but I ALWAYS had the sense that we were a family.
I certainly had not a single iota of a sense that I was less loved, less valued, less of a family member than my siblings or the family that included my siblings and parents. If anyone would be an outcast or scapegoat, I thought it would be my brother John.
John had stood up to my parents when they got violent in ways that none of us dared! While I had been punched, kicked, slapped and otherwise abused by my mother and punched by my father, I had never stood my ground and threatened to respond in kind.
As a Christian family, my brother married after he got his girlfriend pregnant.
John had responded to an assault by Mom by using Aikido and causing her to land on the floor of her own kitchen.
This was back when we were friends, my brother John and me. We had studied Aikido together before I moved to Wilmington and built a life for myself with Lynn. We studied Aikido in the years from 1990 – 1992 when I moved to Wilmington and started a life for myself as an adult.
John had stood his ground and threatened Mom and Dad when they were about to get violent in addition to "using Aikido" against Mom as it was retold to me by Mom. I could put things together and figure out that she had lost her temper again, tried to strike John and ended up on the ground in the kitchen.
He had been brave enough to leave the house and stay elsewhere when things got out of hand... during that time in Augusta, Georgia. The same home where my mother saw my father die and where my mother lived until Carrie put her into a nursing home or some other place before she died.
I am describing events in the early 90s but there was not a flicker of a sense on my part that I was specifically the outcast of the family, the scapegoat.
In the early 90s, after graduating from Georgia Tech, I was planning to go to graduate school for social work. This was well known and accepted. I knew my parents couldn't pay for graduate school and I didn't ask them to do so.
I had graduated from Georgia Tech in 1989, and I thought that it was understood that it would be close to impossible to find a job as an engineer when I had plans to attend graduate school in a radically different field and career direction as a social worker.
Sure, a social worker has more liberal views than the conservate view I knew growing up but that NEVER seemed to be something that would make me an outcast, a scapegoat. It certainly didn't occur in my wildest dreams that I would be totally abandoned if something happened to me outside my control or if someone tried to harm me.
Lynn and I had lived as husband and wife for a large part of the 90s and it NEVER occurred to me that my so-called family would not be supportive if she became sick. Nor would it occur to me that if someone tried to falsely claim that I committed crimes that would put me in jail that they would do nothing.
I NEVER imagined that I would be abandoned by my so-called family.