This is a blog where we can all share our thoughts on the Police State of Canada and the World...if you have ever been falsely accused of a crime, have served time for a crime you did not commit, been detained in conditions not fit for a human being, been assaulted by a police officer or anything that relates to any of these topics...this is the place for you to share your thoughts and views...
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Sharing Our Thoughts
Let's stop the police state before it's too late, time is ticking folks and it's time we stand up together and say WE'RE NOT GOING TO FREAKING TAKE THIS ANYMORE!! Or else you can continue being a sheep...your choice!
My name is Kevin O'Connor. I have resided in a small city on the St Lawrence river for twenty three years called Brockville Ontario. I was born a Canadien citizen and grew up loving my country. Everything about it. My grand father was a war veteran as was my great uncle and great grand father before them. I grew up on tales about the freedom that was won by our great Canadien troops in Europe and how I should be proud that I live in a country that promotes and even excels in its values of freedom. My family life started a downward spiral when I was about three years of age. My mother was training to be a nurse and found the pressure of being a single mom too much. My two sisters, one older, one younger, and I were left alone quite a bit as mother was at school or in placement. Sure she had her share of abusive, useless boyfriends, some alcoholics, some pill heads, that contributed thier own twisted punishments for looking like my father. I vividly remember a closed fisted beating I took at the hands of one of them at seven years of age while my mother took my sisters for a drive. Funny thing is I can't even remember what the beating was about. Anyway by the age of ten I had been stabbed under my right eye by my younger sister and had a pen stuck in the top of my skull by the older and I became retributive in my attempts to defend myself against the two. I learned to fight back. Mother could not have this. Shortly after my tenth birthday I was given to the crown. I became a crown ward of Childrens Aid Society and the real fun began. I was shipped to Beachgrove Regional Childrens Center in Kingston where I would spend the next year, to tell the truth, doing I don't know what. I remember going through a series of medical and pshycological tests, you know electrodes in the head and strobe lights, that sort of thing. I recall also being held on the floor by a couple of staff members so they could give me a needle in the right fore arm that swelled like a great blister under the skin. I don't know what it was. I don't think it was ever explained to me. Of course I am forty now and was only ten at the time. My eleventh year I was released back into my mothers custody. Her new boyfriend was a serious alcoholic and pill eater. I would come home from school and he would offer me handfuls of pharmaceuticals while staggering and falling all over the place. One such afternoon I walked into the house to witness a struggle between my mother, oldest sister and mothers boyfriend. The bastard stabbed my sister across her arm and closed one of my eyes with a backhand. My mother fared the worse. The cops got him though and he did his time and I truly appreciated what they did for me and my family. I even harboured fantasies for a while of becoming a just and brave man like the attending officer who I was to find out years later, was fired from the force for assaulting a young girl. Ah for the fantasy realms of the young. Things went well for a little while. Perhaps even three or four months. My mother began to turn the reasons for her most recent separation to the only thing she could focus on at the time. Me. I must admit I was a bit of a handful. I was ADD before science knew what Attention Deficit Disorder was. In the seventies the cure for such behaviour was to dope the kid up. This ingenious plan was carried out with extreme regularity. Any child who behaved out of the ordinary must be medicated. I spent days at school, not understanding what the teachers were saying or being able to decipher what was on the board. Now, I'm not dyslexic, nor do I have any learning disability, I was just stoned. I grew increasingly more frustrated with the teachers as they did with me. One day my grade five french teacher knocked my desk over with me sitting at it. He screamed at me in front of the other children calling me stupid and lazy. Violence begot violence. I did the only thing I could do to defend myself. I attacked. I wrapped my hand so tightly in his tie he couldn't even throw me away from him. I really don't know what happened next. I think days later I came to the realization that I would not be going back to that school again. My mother really had no choice. There was no other school in that town that would accept me. Back to the care of the CAS. The next seven years were a collage of good and bad foster care. But every where you go and become the new kid in the school there are bullies. I cannot begin to count the personal combats I have survived, not all victorious. I took the worst beating in my life in Cornwall by eight St Regis boys whom I had refused to steal leather jackets for. My nose has been broken numerous times. My teeth have been broken. My hands are full of arthritis and bone splinters and I am only forty. Being thrust into a world of hatred and violence does that to a man. I grew up hard and I grew up mean. By the time I came to Brockville my reputation had preceded me. I am no angel. I have no problem in admitting this. I have done questionable things in my life that I know I am to pay for in the ever after. I believe everything I have done will be heaped in a great banquet of feces before me. We all are judged in the end. No matter what you believe. I have given an account of my childhood because I want you to understand what Brockville Police saw in my troubled youth. I had long hair, Hell I still have long hair and I had my ear and my nose pierced which I had run a piece of chain from. I have a tattoo of the serpent Ea wrapped about a dagger on my forearm I had had since a biker party when I was thirteen. I wore leather and blue jeans and carried a lot of attitude. Overall I was viewed as a real bad ass. Not that I minded the reputation. For the most part people left me alone. There were some who wanted to prove they were tougher, and some of them were, but I backed down from no man and took the beatings as they came. I never pressed charges against anyone nor would the code of the street allow it. I fell in with a crowd that though I would not say they were the wrong crowd, they may have been slightly disreputable. Of course, we were really all just kids, bored broken and discarded. We were just looking for ways to vent. Well these friends had been doing break and enters for months before I came along. I wasn't even aware of the extent of thier opperation. Walking to my buddies place one evening I see a couple of them at the local McDonalds sitting in an old buick I think it was. I hop in the back seat and go for a drive. Halfway to a neighboring town I become aware the car is stolen. That's cool right? What's a teen to do for fun in a town that doesn't like teens. Three days later I was arrested for possesion of a stolen car. I got time in an adult facility where I began to learn how to be a better criminal. It was a great school. I learned a lot. After being released to the streets with no money, no fixed address and no ability to get social services because of it, I struggled to feed myself from whatever means I could. A local donught shop used to throw out thier day olds in big brown paper bags. When you could score from thier dumpster you ate well for a couple of days. That wasn't the only way to eat. There were more than a thousand residences in the area that all had food in thier fridges or freezers. All you had to do was invite yourself in. These were the golden years for break and enter artists. The only home security that existed was in the form of lead and blue steel. Of course that was definately the kind of security you didn't want to come up against. It was during these very turbulent years that I met a guy who would become my partner in crime. I have no idea how many B&E's we were charged for. I think it was upwards of seventy three. My stint in the adult facility for possesion of a stolen car which I should never have been charged with had let loose a demon that hated athority. You see, I was just a passenger. I never stole that car. I never touched the keys. The most I should have been charged with was joy-riding and I knew it. Instead the bred a vengeful monster in the streets and gutters of thier scenic little town. My buddy, whom I will call Fef for his sake, had a knack for picking scores. We ate well and eventually set up a flat where we could work out of. We dabbled in acid and almost constantly smoked weed, but we never did anyone any real harm. We had graduated to buisness scores by this time and each one just made us better. However no matter how good you are there is always someone out there who thinks they will earn a great reward for ratting you out. Its just the way it goes. Back to an adult facility. This time I had even more time on my hands and turned to poetic works. I even started writing my own but most of my writings from that dark time are lost. Anyway I swore I was going to go clean when I got out this time. I think I could even have managed it if I hadn't turned to the bottle. Its not like I'd never been drunk. My first falling down, puking drunk I experienced when I was only eleven and I was kicked out of group home at fourteen because they feared I was an alcoholic. Hell, why not get me the help I needed? I don't know. I guess it's easier to throw out the trash them to try to recycle it. Well in any event the drink became my best friend and boy did we hang out. I don't remember alot of the next couple of years. I started a meat cutters apprenticeship, got busted for weed, continued to work off my sentence from a half way house. Then one day I asked for a raise. The mocking reply from the stores manager led me away from that line of employment and I had more time to drink. I didn't stay out of work long. I managed to hook a couple of auto mechanics jobs in greasy little fly by night garages. I even managed to get a girlfriend and a decent place to live. But the booze was to come back to haunt me. Guided by vodka and the belief that a cab driver had just run over my dog, I leaped upon the hood of his car and proceeded to smash the window out. My girlfriend at the time forcibly convinced me to flee. Police showed up. I don't speak well with the bastards, so I always end up in trouble. I pointed my finger at the cop and screamed at him. He proceeded to attack me through anyone standing in the way. My girlfriend was injured in the attack in which at no time did I offer ant resistance. The cop hit his head on our floor model tv as he was taking me down. I admit to the mischief charge they found me guilty of. Even if the cab driver had hit my dog I had no right to damage his property let alone scaring the living shit out of him. But of the charge of assulting a police officer which forever comes back to haunt me, I don't understand. The cop lied on the stand, saying first I punched him with my left hand then he said I hit him with my right hand, then he said he didn't know how I had hit him , I just did. Come on. Well the court ruled in his favor because the judge decreed that pointing a finger at someone and yelling is indeed assault. I was charged with yelling at someone and exercising my right to free speach. Where in the last ten years did the freedom that my fore fathers had fought for disappear to? Could this be some kind of joke? The Brockville judicial system must be corrupt. Well I did my time again. What could I do? There is no fight left in a kicked dog. Or is there? This time when I got out, I decided I needed an education if I was going to break free of the gutter I was thrust into. I enrolled in the local college and upgraded. College was a blast. I was aloud to work at my own pace and covered three years of courses in just seven months. I graduated at the top of my studies with nothing less than a "B". I even worked on calculus in my own time and started tutoring mathematics and college communications. Life was getting better. I worked two jobs for a while until I was picked up by a major international manufacturing and production firm. I started as a line worker but worked my way into a lesser management position in less than a year. I continued my studies in night courses and gained a ticket in Industrial Manufacturing Technology. The company even paid for it. In 1998 there was a union push at the plant and they let everyone go,changed the name of the facility and hired everyone back that would go for lower wages. That's fair right? Fortunatley I was able to step up. I was offered a job with another major firm for more money than I was already making so I made the logical choice. This new place was cushy. All you had to do was push buttons. The kind of job I can't stand. Thanks to the Ice Storm of 98 my starting date was put off for a week, but things were soon full steam ahead. What more could a man want than 60 to 70 thousand dollars a year? What could possibly go wrong? Collitis, that's what. My climb to fortune was about to take a very nasty turn. That girlfriend I had at 19 turned out to be my wife for 14 years. It was at this time in my sickness while I was losing weight rapidly and continuosly going for surgery, that she did not love me anymore. That did wonders for my stress related disease. Within that year I lost three people very close to me and my dog died of cancer. I was stuck in some really bad country song. I lost my job because I could no longer perform the duties I was hired for. Yeah right. Get rid of the dead weight. I got to tell you the next three years were tough. I fell into a vortex of despair. I lost everything to my self destruct sequence. I became heavily addicted to cocaine, free basing and eventually main linig the shit. I woke one morning with a needle still in my arm on the floor of my sisters attic. I no longer cared about anything. It was worse than my times on the street by a thousand fold. I do not want to go into details about that time of my life. I saw in those dark days things that mortals should probably not see and I lost more friends. Most of this time I spent with a gun to my head, literally. I thought the world was over and I wanted out. Then my life took another strange twist. I met another girl. My Jen. I think my first words to her were "Who the f@%! are you and what are you doing in this car." You know, love at first sight. She moved in and we began a series of ups and downs. In march of 2003 we were brutally robbed at gun point by the Bockville Police Department. In thier typically inteligent way they smashed our doors apart with a battering ram, placed guns to our heads and forcibly confined us while they ransacked my house. One of the few items I had saved of my grandfathers lay broken on the floor. A pipe carved in Ireland. For that alone I could have wept. Brockville's finest found 1 gram of weed and a gram and a half of pot oil. I know what you're thinking. I shouldn't have had the stuff right? Maybe so, but what they did next is going to knock you're socks off. When they were leaving they through a warrant on my coffee table for somebody else at a different address. That's right. I have all the paper work to prove it. They drag me through court for eight months with no representation. Duty council goes on strike, Legal Aid refuses me and I can't come up with the thousand dollar retainer fee. I started screaming about my rights as a Canadien citizen and the week before my trial they dropped the charges but refused to give back what they had stolen from me. I tried to get lawyers to represent me in a counter suit and I was told I waited too long. It took a long time to get over that anger. I laugh every time I hear the words intelligence officer. Finally in my life something good was to happen though. My Jen and I procreated. I was given the miracle of a beautiful baby daughter and my eyes were opened to true love; unfettered, uncensored purity. I still get teary eyed when I relieve her birth. It was the most significant proof of God I could ever have imagined. If you are not a parent, trust me, you can't possibly understand that kind of love. And the best thing was thirteen months later my lovely spouse gave me a baby boy. Now with three from her previous relationship we had a houseful. We needed to move. Money was tight in our household but somehow we were managing. After a brief tribunal battle with a slum lord we were able to move to a place that wasn't falling down around us. Well with our new life came new problems. We had six of us living in one house. Not too hard I guess but it would have been nice to recieve some kind of support from my step childrens father. I guess this is about the time when the oldest step daughter came home from out west with her new hubby. She was pregnant with our first grand child and we wanted them close. I had since been put on a disability pention because of my continually failing health due to the collitis. It was hard to feed everybody but we were all close and it didn't really matter. In a few months my step daughter and son-in-law moved out and all seemed to be getting back to normal. My hatred of the system had gradually declined and was altogether replaced by my love for my family. It wasn't all honey and cream but we were doing alright. My wife went back to work and I became a stay at home dad, where I get a chance to watch the little ones learn and grow. I wouldn't give it up for the world. But the money sucks. And that is what leads me to my next incident with Brockville's Finest. December 4th 2006 around 2 pm we got into an argument about money. I had injured my back in a coughing fit the previous week, sounds funny right? Not at all. My wife had to take time off work to watch after our wee one's because I could barely walk. The argument led her to try to push me out the door to do what I could for our family. Can't really blame her. We have a dog that's defensive of any aggresion. It started leaping around our feet. The phone was overturned and the big blue buttons at the top of the phone activated a 911 call. I know this sounds funny too, but anybody who has an Ambassador speaker phone with emergency numbers preprogrammed will plainly see how this could happen. Well...Hello Mr Police Officer. sigh.... When they come into my house the argument had long been over. My wife was baking in the kitchen, my baby girl was asleep on the couch and my son sat quietly on my knee. One of the cops went into the kitchen and started talking to my wife while the other came out to talk to me. My inquisitor asked if the argument had got violent and I told him it didn't. We joked a little about my sons name, you see we named him Odin, I thought they were getting ready to leave. Then the call came in. The cop in the kitchen put his hand to his ear and then turned to my wife and said "We're takin him." Over the cries of my wife screaming that I hadn't done anything the cop charges into the living room and says "You are being charged with domestic violence." I put my boy on the floor and started to stand, stiffly because of my back injury, and he immediately wrestled me to the floor driving his knee firmly into my injured back. I was smashed into the wall on the way out the door while my wife yelled at them to stop hurting me and informed them of my injury. The arresting officer reafed even harder on my bonds and said "Then stop resisting". It was obvious he was trying convince all of my neighbors and peers I had done something wrong. He even amplified his exaggeration by slandering me with the term "Woman Beater." As I have earlier stated, I am no saint but never have I beaten a woman. My only assault on my record is against a police officer and well I think we know what that was about. Bullshit. I was charged and put into a cell for twenty four hours before going to bail. The cell was nothing more than a DNA farm with feces, blood, spit, urine, vomit, you name it. Keep in my that it was December 4th and the temperature was to drop to -14C that night and then explain to me why they left the window wide open to the cell block. I'd been inside before. I had never seen such conditions. These were cells for the accused in a fairly modern police station. Accused. Innocent until proven guilty, or am I wrong in this. I was subjected to twenty four hours of bright light combined with a constant drip of water from the next cell and the freezing cold had me vomiting myself by mid morning. By the time I was taken to court for my bail hearing, an officer who had known my family all my life told them to do what ever they had to to get me out. It didn't take much. My wife went to the court house and signed my bail bond. I was released to her custody to continue my job as primary care giver for the family I was accused of abusing. So I apply for Legal Aid right? Wrong. I was immediatley refused and had to appeal. After sitting in a room with a dozen lawyers and convincing them that my history of bogus charges would land me a sentence. Finally they listened. The court dragged it out for five months before it would go to trial at which time I was totally acquitted. Go figure. I am still trying to get over that one. Now I know there are other people out there with similar experiences. I see the degradation of our society due not to criminal activity but to the unjust prostitutes of our criminal justice system. Without a firm hold on our government, we allow ourselves to be tred upon by the only thing that makes our government work...money. This is the driving force in justice. Perhaps if the bogus charges on my record weren't there I would never have had to hear the words, "Your record speaks for itself." Perhaps if I would have had the money for proper representation the first time around I wouldn't be seen as such a vile monster of society as the Brockville Police Department has portrayed me.
1 comment:
My name is Kevin O'Connor. I have resided in a small city on the St Lawrence river for twenty three years called Brockville Ontario. I was born a Canadien citizen and grew up loving my country. Everything about it.
My grand father was a war veteran as was my great uncle and great grand father before them. I grew up on tales about the freedom that was won by our great Canadien troops in Europe and how I should be proud that I live in a country that promotes and even excels in its values of freedom.
My family life started a downward spiral when I was about three years of age. My mother was training to be a nurse and found the pressure of being a single mom too much. My two sisters, one older, one younger, and I were left alone quite a bit as mother was at school or in placement. Sure she had her share of abusive, useless boyfriends, some alcoholics, some pill heads, that contributed thier own twisted punishments for looking like my father. I vividly remember a closed fisted beating I took at the hands of one of them at seven years of age while my mother took my sisters for a drive. Funny thing is I can't even remember what the beating was about.
Anyway by the age of ten I had been stabbed under my right eye by my younger sister and had a pen stuck in the top of my skull by the older and I became retributive in my attempts to defend myself against the two. I learned to fight back. Mother could not have this. Shortly after my tenth birthday I was given to the crown. I became a crown ward of Childrens Aid Society and the real fun began.
I was shipped to Beachgrove Regional Childrens Center in Kingston where I would spend the next year, to tell the truth, doing I don't know what. I remember going through a series of medical and pshycological tests, you know electrodes in the head and strobe lights, that sort of thing. I recall also being held on the floor by a couple of staff members so they could give me a needle in the right fore arm that swelled like a great blister under the skin. I don't know what it was. I don't think it was ever explained to me. Of course I am forty now and was only ten at the time.
My eleventh year I was released back into my mothers custody. Her new boyfriend was a serious alcoholic and pill eater. I would come home from school and he would offer me handfuls of pharmaceuticals while staggering and falling all over the place. One such afternoon I walked into the house to witness a struggle between my mother, oldest sister and mothers boyfriend. The bastard stabbed my sister across her arm and closed one of my eyes with a backhand. My mother fared the worse. The cops got him though and he did his time and I truly appreciated what they did for me and my family. I even harboured fantasies for a while of becoming a just and brave man like the attending officer who I was to find out years later, was fired from the force for assaulting a young girl. Ah for the fantasy realms of the young.
Things went well for a little while. Perhaps even three or four months. My mother began to turn the reasons for her most recent separation to the only thing she could focus on at the time. Me.
I must admit I was a bit of a handful. I was ADD before science knew what Attention Deficit Disorder was. In the seventies the cure for such behaviour was to dope the kid up. This ingenious plan was carried out with extreme regularity. Any child who behaved out of the ordinary must be medicated.
I spent days at school, not understanding what the teachers were saying or being able to decipher what was on the board. Now, I'm not dyslexic, nor do I have any learning disability, I was just stoned. I grew increasingly more frustrated with the teachers as they did with me. One day my grade five french teacher knocked my desk over with me sitting at it. He screamed at me in front of the other children calling me stupid and lazy. Violence begot violence. I did the only thing I could do to defend myself. I attacked. I wrapped my hand so tightly in his tie he couldn't even throw me away from him. I really don't know what happened next. I think days later I came to the realization that I would not be going back to that school again.
My mother really had no choice. There was no other school in that town that would accept me. Back to the care of the CAS. The next seven years were a collage of good and bad foster care. But every where you go and become the new kid in the school there are bullies. I cannot begin to count the personal combats I have survived, not all victorious. I took the worst beating in my life in Cornwall by eight St Regis boys whom I had refused to steal leather jackets for. My nose has been broken numerous times. My teeth have been broken. My hands are full of arthritis and bone splinters and I am only forty. Being thrust into a world of hatred and violence does that to a man. I grew up hard and I grew up mean. By the time I came to Brockville my reputation had preceded me.
I am no angel. I have no problem in admitting this. I have done questionable things in my life that I know I am to pay for in the ever after. I believe everything I have done will be heaped in a great banquet of feces before me. We all are judged in the end. No matter what you believe.
I have given an account of my childhood because I want you to understand what Brockville Police saw in my troubled youth. I had long hair, Hell I still have long hair and I had my ear and my nose pierced which I had run a piece of chain from. I have a tattoo of the serpent Ea wrapped about a dagger on my forearm I had had since a biker party when I was thirteen. I wore leather and blue jeans and carried a lot of attitude. Overall I was viewed as a real bad ass. Not that I minded the reputation. For the most part people left me alone. There were some who wanted to prove they were tougher, and some of them were, but I backed down from no man and took the beatings as they came. I never pressed charges against anyone nor would the code of the street allow it.
I fell in with a crowd that though I would not say they were the wrong crowd, they may have been slightly disreputable. Of course, we were really all just kids, bored broken and discarded. We were just looking for ways to vent.
Well these friends had been doing break and enters for months before I came along. I wasn't even aware of the extent of thier opperation. Walking to my buddies place one evening I see a couple of them at the local McDonalds sitting in an old buick I think it was. I hop in the back seat and go for a drive. Halfway to a neighboring town I become aware the car is stolen. That's cool right? What's a teen to do for fun in a town that doesn't like teens. Three days later I was arrested for possesion of a stolen car. I got time in an adult facility where I began to learn how to be a better criminal. It was a great school. I learned a lot.
After being released to the streets with no money, no fixed address and no ability to get social services because of it, I struggled to feed myself from whatever means I could. A local donught shop used to throw out thier day olds in big brown paper bags. When you could score from thier dumpster you ate well for a couple of days. That wasn't the only way to eat. There were more than a thousand residences in the area that all had food in thier fridges or freezers. All you had to do was invite yourself in.
These were the golden years for break and enter artists. The only home security that existed was in the form of lead and blue steel. Of course that was definately the kind of security you didn't want to come up against.
It was during these very turbulent years that I met a guy who would become my partner in crime. I have no idea how many B&E's we were charged for. I think it was upwards of seventy three. My stint in the adult facility for possesion of a stolen car which I should never have been charged with had let loose a demon that hated athority. You see, I was just a passenger. I never stole that car. I never touched the keys. The most I should have been charged with was joy-riding and I knew it. Instead the bred a vengeful monster in the streets and gutters of thier scenic little town.
My buddy, whom I will call Fef for his sake, had a knack for picking scores. We ate well and eventually set up a flat where we could work out of. We dabbled in acid and almost constantly smoked weed, but we never did anyone any real harm. We had graduated to buisness scores by this time and each one just made us better. However no matter how good you are there is always someone out there who thinks they will earn a great reward for ratting you out. Its just the way it goes.
Back to an adult facility.
This time I had even more time on my hands and turned to poetic works. I even started writing my own but most of my writings from that dark time are lost. Anyway I swore I was going to go clean when I got out this time. I think I could even have managed it if I hadn't turned to the bottle. Its not like I'd never been drunk. My first falling down, puking drunk I experienced when I was only eleven and I was kicked out of group home at fourteen because they feared I was an alcoholic. Hell, why not get me the help I needed? I don't know. I guess it's easier to throw out the trash them to try to recycle it.
Well in any event the drink became my best friend and boy did we hang out. I don't remember alot of the next couple of years. I started a meat cutters apprenticeship, got busted for weed, continued to work off my sentence from a half way house. Then one day I asked for a raise. The mocking reply from the stores manager led me away from that line of employment and I had more time to drink. I didn't stay out of work long. I managed to hook a couple of auto mechanics jobs in greasy little fly by night garages. I even managed to get a girlfriend and a decent place to live. But the booze was to come back to haunt me. Guided by vodka and the belief that a cab driver had just run over my dog, I leaped upon the hood of his car and proceeded to smash the window out. My girlfriend at the time forcibly convinced me to flee. Police showed up. I don't speak well with the bastards, so I always end up in trouble. I pointed my finger at the cop and screamed at him. He proceeded to attack me through anyone standing in the way. My girlfriend was injured in the attack in which at no time did I offer ant resistance. The cop hit his head on our floor model tv as he was taking me down. I admit to the mischief charge they found me guilty of. Even if the cab driver had hit my dog I had no right to damage his property let alone scaring the living shit out of him. But of the charge of assulting a police officer which forever comes back to haunt me, I don't understand. The cop lied on the stand, saying first I punched him with my left hand then he said I hit him with my right hand, then he said he didn't know how I had hit him , I just did. Come on. Well the court ruled in his favor because the judge decreed that pointing a finger at someone and yelling is indeed assault. I was charged with yelling at someone and exercising my right to free speach.
Where in the last ten years did the freedom that my fore fathers had fought for disappear to? Could this be some kind of joke? The Brockville judicial system must be corrupt.
Well I did my time again. What could I do? There is no fight left in a kicked dog. Or is there?
This time when I got out, I decided I needed an education if I was going to break free of the gutter I was thrust into. I enrolled in the local college and upgraded. College was a blast. I was aloud to work at my own pace and covered three years of courses in just seven months. I graduated at the top of my studies with nothing less than a "B". I even worked on calculus in my own time and started tutoring mathematics and college communications. Life was getting better. I worked two jobs for a while until I was picked up by a major international manufacturing and production firm. I started as a line worker but worked my way into a lesser management position in less than a year. I continued my studies in night courses and gained a ticket in Industrial Manufacturing Technology. The company even paid for it. In 1998 there was a union push at the plant and they let everyone go,changed the name of the facility and hired everyone back that would go for lower wages. That's fair right?
Fortunatley I was able to step up. I was offered a job with another major firm for more money than I was already making so I made the logical choice.
This new place was cushy. All you had to do was push buttons. The kind of job I can't stand. Thanks to the Ice Storm of 98 my starting date was put off for a week, but things were soon full steam ahead.
What more could a man want than 60 to 70 thousand dollars a year? What could possibly go wrong?
Collitis, that's what. My climb to fortune was about to take a very nasty turn. That girlfriend I had at 19 turned out to be my wife for 14 years. It was at this time in my sickness while I was losing weight rapidly and continuosly going for surgery, that she did not love me anymore. That did wonders for my stress related disease. Within that year I lost three people very close to me and my dog died of cancer. I was stuck in some really bad country song. I lost my job because I could no longer perform the duties I was hired for. Yeah right. Get rid of the dead weight.
I got to tell you the next three years were tough. I fell into a vortex of despair. I lost everything to my self destruct sequence. I became heavily addicted to cocaine, free basing and eventually main linig the shit. I woke one morning with a needle still in my arm on the floor of my sisters attic. I no longer cared about anything. It was worse than my times on the street by a thousand fold. I do not want to go into details about that time of my life. I saw in those dark days things that mortals should probably not see and I lost more friends. Most of this time I spent with a gun to my head, literally. I thought the world was over and I wanted out. Then my life took another strange twist. I met another girl. My Jen. I think my first words to her were "Who the f@%! are you and what are you doing in this car." You know, love at first sight.
She moved in and we began a series of ups and downs. In march of 2003 we were brutally robbed at gun point by the Bockville Police Department. In thier typically inteligent way they smashed our doors apart with a battering ram, placed guns to our heads and forcibly confined us while they ransacked my house. One of the few items I had saved of my grandfathers lay broken on the floor. A pipe carved in Ireland. For that alone I could have wept. Brockville's finest found 1 gram of weed and a gram and a half of pot oil. I know what you're thinking. I shouldn't have had the stuff right? Maybe so, but what they did next is going to knock you're socks off. When they were leaving they through a warrant on my coffee table for somebody else at a different address. That's right. I have all the paper work to prove it. They drag me through court for eight months with no representation. Duty council goes on strike, Legal Aid refuses me and I can't come up with the thousand dollar retainer fee. I started screaming about my rights as a Canadien citizen and the week before my trial they dropped the charges but refused to give back what they had stolen from me. I tried to get lawyers to represent me in a counter suit and I was told I waited too long. It took a long time to get over that anger. I laugh every time I hear the words intelligence officer.
Finally in my life something good was to happen though. My Jen and I procreated. I was given the miracle of a beautiful baby daughter and my eyes were opened to true love; unfettered, uncensored purity. I still get teary eyed when I relieve her birth. It was the most significant proof of God I could ever have imagined. If you are not a parent, trust me, you can't possibly understand that kind of love. And the best thing was thirteen months later my lovely spouse gave me a baby boy. Now with three from her previous relationship we had a houseful. We needed to move.
Money was tight in our household but somehow we were managing. After a brief tribunal battle with a slum lord we were able to move to a place that wasn't falling down around us.
Well with our new life came new problems. We had six of us living in one house. Not too hard I guess but it would have been nice to recieve some kind of support from my step childrens father. I guess this is about the time when the oldest step daughter came home from out west with her new hubby. She was pregnant with our first grand child and we wanted them close. I had since been put on a disability pention because of my continually failing health due to the collitis. It was hard to feed everybody but we were all close and it didn't really matter. In a few months my step daughter and son-in-law moved out and all seemed to be getting back to normal. My hatred of the system had gradually declined and was altogether replaced by my love for my family. It wasn't all honey and cream but we were doing alright.
My wife went back to work and I became a stay at home dad, where I get a chance to watch the little ones learn and grow. I wouldn't give it up for the world. But the money sucks.
And that is what leads me to my next incident with Brockville's Finest.
December 4th 2006 around 2 pm we got into an argument about money. I had injured my back in a coughing fit the previous week, sounds funny right? Not at all. My wife had to take time off work to watch after our wee one's because I could barely walk. The argument led her to try to push me out the door to do what I could for our family. Can't really blame her. We have a dog that's defensive of any aggresion. It started leaping around our feet. The phone was overturned and the big blue buttons at the top of the phone activated a 911 call. I know this sounds funny too, but anybody who has an Ambassador speaker phone with emergency numbers preprogrammed will plainly see how this could happen. Well...Hello Mr Police Officer. sigh....
When they come into my house the argument had long been over. My wife was baking in the kitchen, my baby girl was asleep on the couch and my son sat quietly on my knee. One of the cops went into the kitchen and started talking to my wife while the other came out to talk to me. My inquisitor asked if the argument had got violent and I told him it didn't. We joked a little about my sons name, you see we named him Odin, I thought they were getting ready to leave. Then the call came in. The cop in the kitchen put his hand to his ear and then turned to my wife and said "We're takin him." Over the cries of my wife screaming that I hadn't done anything the cop charges into the living room and says "You are being charged with domestic violence." I put my boy on the floor and started to stand, stiffly because of my back injury, and he immediately wrestled me to the floor driving his knee firmly into my injured back. I was smashed into the wall on the way out the door while my wife yelled at them to stop hurting me and informed them of my injury. The arresting officer reafed even harder on my bonds and said "Then stop resisting". It was obvious he was trying convince all of my neighbors and peers I had done something wrong. He even amplified his exaggeration by slandering me with the term "Woman Beater." As I have earlier stated, I am no saint but never have I beaten a woman. My only assault on my record is against a police officer and well I think we know what that was about. Bullshit.
I was charged and put into a cell for twenty four hours before going to bail. The cell was nothing more than a DNA farm with feces, blood, spit, urine, vomit, you name it. Keep in my that it was December 4th and the temperature was to drop to -14C that night and then explain to me why they left the window wide open to the cell block. I'd been inside before. I had never seen such conditions. These were cells for the accused in a fairly modern police station. Accused. Innocent until proven guilty, or am I wrong in this. I was subjected to twenty four hours of bright light combined with a constant drip of water from the next cell and the freezing cold had me vomiting myself by mid morning. By the time I was taken to court for my bail hearing, an officer who had known my family all my life told them to do what ever they had to to get me out. It didn't take much. My wife went to the court house and signed my bail bond. I was released to her custody to continue my job as primary care giver for the family I was accused of abusing.
So I apply for Legal Aid right? Wrong. I was immediatley refused and had to appeal. After sitting in a room with a dozen lawyers and convincing them that my history of bogus charges would land me a sentence. Finally they listened. The court dragged it out for five months before it would go to trial at which time I was totally acquitted. Go figure.
I am still trying to get over that one.
Now I know there are other people out there with similar experiences. I see the degradation of our society due not to criminal activity but to the unjust prostitutes of our criminal justice system. Without a firm hold on our government, we allow ourselves to be tred upon by the only thing that makes our government work...money. This is the driving force in justice. Perhaps if the bogus charges on my record weren't there I would never have had to hear the words, "Your record speaks for itself." Perhaps if I would have had the money for proper representation the first time around I wouldn't be seen as such a vile monster of society as the Brockville Police Department has portrayed me.
Thank You For Your Blogs.
Kevin O'Connor
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