REFUGEES USA: Seedy Motels, Drugs, Constant Fear and Flight

We lived in David’s uncle’s trailer for a couple of months, which was one of the most depressing places I’ve ever lived.  His uncle was a meth dealer, and people would come to the trailer at all times of day, and there was always fear of cops coming, or listening, or doing something.

We lived in the dining room area, with a sheet to separate our space off from the rest of the house.  After two months there, we moved in with his mom for a couple of weeks.  While at his mom’s house, I finally found a decent job and we found out I was pregnant.  After I got the job, we moved into yet another seedy motel in a crappy area, and lived there for a few weeks, until I had a miscarriage, and subsequently got fired from my job.

David came to the hospital with me when I was having the miscarriage, but he started having panic attacks just seeing security guards, thinking they were cops, so he had to leave.  We were stressing about how to pay our rent. In part because an SO on the run doesn’t exactly have any job leads, David was going to try to sell meth to keep a roof over our heads.  Something I almost never would have agreed to, but when you are desperate, you will agree to some things.

Someone wound up cutting the meth, and we lost all of the money we put into it. So over five days, we lost my job, our first baby, every last dime we had, and my best friend stopped talking to me. I found out later it was because she “didn’t agree with the choices I was making.”  We wound up having my mom wire us money to take a Greyhound to Omaha, where we lived with her for a couple of weeks, and then found an apartment.

We had to move out of that place after a short while, and we went back to my mom’s house for about a week. Then she said David couldn’t stay anymore, so he took a bus to his brother’s house in another state.  We are pretty sure his brother turned him in.

David was arrested. He called me from jail, freaking out, thinking I was going to leave him and not wait any longer.  We knew he only had the nine months left to serve on the original offense, but we also were expecting a failure to register (FTR) charge. We had no idea how much time that could carry.

David was returned to the state where it all started, and I moved back there in March 2010. He was sent back to prison for violating his parole. We were married in a visitation room in May 2010.  Neither of us wanted to get married in there. One of the morbid reasons I chose to do it that way, is because people were trying to kill him in prison, and I wanted to have the legal right to tell the state that they would not bury my husband in a prison cemetery.

We got about 45 minutes of a visit after we got married (they extended it, as it was only supposed to be 20 minutes), and had our wedding cake out of a vending machine, and I went to work that night.  I remember going to visit the next day, and one of the guards said, “Good morning, Mrs. _______ . How’s married life?” 

And I said “not much different, he’s still in here.”  Ha ha.

They were all actually pretty nice and respectful at that prison.  They let him serve his last nine months before bringing him back to county jail to charge him with the FTR.  The prosecutor offered a plea bargain of no prison time with lifetime probation, and, against the advice of every other inmate, and his wife, he signed it so he could get out. I picked him up in October 2010 and we moved into another seedy motel.  We darted from motel to motel based on financial issues and how close we could find super cheap food that we didn’t need to refrigerate.

We found an apartment in a neighborhood full of crackheads (one tried to break in our window at 4 a.m. once), and prostitutes.  We were evicted from that apartment because they thought our room wasn’t being kept clean. It was cluttered because of the lifestyle we were forced into. It was not dirty.

David didn’t understand why, if we were paying rent, they had any reason to come check up on us.  They somewhat operated like a prison (from what David told me), and it was predominantly SO’s at that complex. 

We wound up moving in with my former mother in law (who has actually been one of the MOST supportive people in this, overall).  We lived with her for a few weeks. But when her daughter planned to come visit from another state, she kicked us out. We had nowhere else to go. My ex mother-in-law didn’t want her daughter to be upset about David living there.