A Christmas to Remember

I did some home visits last week for the first time since I broke my ankle nearly three months ago. It was a pretty routine day. Several people have asked me lately, though, in some form or fashion, how my day went and/or what's involved in a day in the field. So I figured, why not write about it?

What's the point of a home visit? Well, it could be a number of things. We may just be verifying an address, making sure the probationer lives where s/he says s/he lives. It probably doesn't come as a shock to learn that probationers don't always give us correct addresses.

The most common reason we do home visits is to see probationers in their natural habitats. Anyone can come into our office once a month and put on a dog-and-pony show for 15-30 minutes and give us the impression that everything is hunky-dory in their world. But when we get out there and see their neighborhood, see their house, see their living conditions, meet the other occupants of the house, see how they're dressed, see if they're awake at 2:00pm, etc., we get a much more accurate picture of what obstacles this person has to overcome to succeed on probation.

We may also do a home visit for a specific purpose. Maybe someone called and said the probationer is drinking or using drugs, so we drop in and give urine screens and breath tests. Maybe the probationer missed an appointment at our office. Maybe it's Monday Night Football, and the Colts are playing. Maybe it's New Year's Eve....

The good home visits last only a few minutes. We make contact with the probationer, have a chat, take a quick look around the house for alcohol, drugs, firearms, dead bodies, and anything else that might be a probation violation, take care of any other business we have with the person, and we're on to the next one.

The ones that don't go so well...well, they take longer. And occasionally, we need the assistance of the police. And every now and then, medics. Those are more entertaining stories, aren't they?

I've had probationers answer the door with a beer in their hand. We don't permit anyone sentenced out of our Courts, regardless of the offense, to possess or consume alcohol. The look on their faces is priceless when they realize who's at the door.

We've arrived at homes to find probationers in the process of smoking marijuana. Often, there are several people partaking, and they're not very happy to see us there. They're even less happy when we confiscate their supply. I love it when, inevitably, someone says, "You can't do that!" I respond by suggesting that we call the police and have them decide what I can and can't do. I've never had anyone take me up on my offer.

On more than one occasion, we've arrived at a home to discover a probationer completely incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs. So much so that we've had to call for medics.

Sometimes they're drunk and/or high and threatening suicide. Those encounters are often around this time of year.

Mental health issues are always an adventure to deal with. I had been to one particular residence a couple times without any problems when I decided to take one of our new officers with me for another visit. My probationer, wrought with mental health issues, greeted us on his front porch, yelling obscenities and threatening to kill my partner. He "could just tell" that my partner was "dirty" and "a backstabber." The tirade and threats continued until I finally got him settled down. I later discussed it with my probationer, who maintained that my partner was "cocky, underhanded, and shifty" (despite the fact that my partner had been out of the car for about five seconds and hadn't spoken a word when the threats began raining down on him), but agreed to behave himself if I only brought female partners with me on future home visits. He felt less threatened by female officers, he said. So a few weeks later, I brought a female officer with me. My probationer, however, did not hold up to his end of the bargain. Round Two was almost as ugly as Round One. The judge revoked his probation shortly after that.

I've been to residences where the smell of animal urine is so overwhelming that I couldn't stay inside. You know it's going to be bad inside when you can smell the cat piss as soon as you get out of the car. In the middle of winter. More times than I can count, I've walked through a minefield of animal feces inside a house.

On one home visit several years ago, we went to an apartment where we could hear kids inside, but no one would come to the door. We finally talked one of the kids into opening the door. Three kids inside, ranging from 2 to 4 years old. No adults. Feces smeared all over the walls, broken glass all over the carpet, the youngest child's diaper dragging on the ground, and the middle child eating hair gel. The oldest had opened the door for us. We called the police, who, in turn, called Child Protective Services. More than two hours from the time of our arrival, we were still there when the mother showed up, returning from a trip to the liquor store. She went to jail. The kids went into CPS custody.

I could go on and on, but you're probably getting bored by now. I do, however, want to share the story of the mother of all home visits (so far, anyway).

Two years ago, right about this time of year, one of my coworkers got a call that one of her probationers was drunk at home. This guy had a long history of out-of-control drinking, and I had previously supervised him on another case, so my coworker asked me to go with her to do a home visit. When we got there, he was extremely intoxicated. He blew a .340% BAC on a portable breath tester. That's more than four times the legal limit to drive. Once you get up around the .400% BAC range, it's usually fatal.

But this guy was standing, walking, and talking. He was a professional drinker.

He pretty quickly decided that he didn't like us being there, but we couldn't just leave him there in that level of intoxication, given the risk to his own health and safety, plus the fact that there were two cars in the driveway, and he had a penchant for driving drunk. At some point while my partner called for an ambulance, the guy decided he didn't want them there, either, and he stormed out of the house into 20-degree temperatures and an inch of snow, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. No shirt, no shoes, no socks, no sense.

He repeatedly reeled off an expletive-laden tirade that was, to summarize, graphically expressing his deep desire for us to get off of his property. But now, on top of him being royally intoxicated, he was out in the cold and snow with minimal clothing. We weren't leaving him in that state of affairs.

I followed him outside as he got into his truck while my partner updated Dispatch on the situation and asked for the police to be sent our way, since it appeared he was going to try to take to the public roadways. The windshield of the truck was covered in snow, so I couldn't see what he was doing, or what he had inside the truck. I took cover behind a nearby vehicle and was yelling at him to get out of the truck. After a minute or so, he complied, but he wouldn't show his hands as he slowly rounded the front of the truck and headed in our direction. My repeated commands for him to show me his hands went unanswered, and I vividly remember calling him by his first name and telling him not to make me shoot him at Christmastime. He still didn't show me his hands. He could have had anything in them, retrieved from the truck behind the snow-covered windshield.

I was starting to run through the checklist in my mind. I knew where my partner was, because I could hear her frantically telling Dispatch to get the police here YESTERDAY, and she wasn't in the crossfire. There was a large yard behind my target, so if my round went through him, it would run out of momentum before it hit any houses or people. I had as much of my body as I could get behind the engine block of the car, and I was in a good, steady firing position, at a distance from which I am quite an accurate shot. I had given every possible verbal command that I could think of to get him to show me his hands. If he displayed a weapon and advanced toward me or my partner, I was prepared to do what I needed to do to get my partner and myself home in one piece.

After some thought, though, the probationer decided to hold out his hands. They were empty.

Seconds later, two police officers came screaming up to the house. Their sirens were sweet, sweet music to my ears. Having the arrest powers that we lack, the police made short work of the probationer and hauled him off to jail by way of the hospital, due to his level of intoxication.

It was a quiet drive back to the office as my partner and I each mulled over in our minds what had happened, as well as what could have happened.

The probationer got a month in jail and nine months of home detention for his probation violation. He lasted just over a month on home detention before he was drinking again. He spent the remaining eight months of his home detention sentence in prison. I recently heard from another county's probation department that they are supervising him for another drunk driving case that he picked up after his release from prison.

The vast majority of our home visits are quick and uneventful. But every now and then, we get a whopper that sticks with you for awhile.