The Nightmare Before Easter

As much as I’d like to say it was an April’s Fool joke, as many of you know yesterday our American Dream became an American Horror Story when at 7am, while I was having my morning walk, a guy with a bulletproof vest, ski mask and a gun started knocking on our door nonstop. I answered through the doorbell and he said he needed to speak to me and my wife. I called 911 to report that, came back home from the backyard, locked the gates, and talked to him through the locked gate. He insisted he needed to talk to my wife too so at that point I assumed someone decided to prank us and called the police reporting some sort of domestic abuse. I asked my wife, who was still in bed, to come down, and while we waited I told the guy that I found it very odd that the Orange County Sheriff’s Office would send an officer alone for a house call and that I wouldn’t talk to him without a physical barrier. He said another officer was coming and we could just wait for him. My wife came to the gate and asked what was happening, when and he repeated that she needed to talk to him at the front door. Another cop arrived and approached the gate holding his gun and I asked him why he was holding a gun if we were both unarmed and harmless. My daughter came confused (we were at our lanai/backyard) and my wife went to take her inside when 5 cops who jumped through our fence, pointing their pistols to my head and telling me to get down on my knees. I yelled to my wife “go back inside and lock the door”, the cops entered the lanai and pointed a gun to my wife’s face through the glass door, while my daughter and her grandma were at her side. At that point, fearing for their lives, I yelled to my wife to comply, open the door and come out with her hands up. They put us both in handcuffs, went into our house and walked us out from the front door while my daughter and mother-in-law cried in desperation. I asked if I could grab my wallet and they said no.

They made us sit down handcuffed at our front porch while we saw in disbelief half a dozen police cars blocking our entire street. We were taken to the Orange County Jail in separate cars, both handcuffed for all the trip. Once we got there, we were told to strip all our clothes and belongs, put a blue jumpsuit that smelled like towels from a $10 motel, gross heavily used flip-flops, and to sit down in separate sections at the booking area. I asked if I could make a phone call and I was given a paper with my inmate number and instructions on how to make a call. The phones, were not like public phones in a wall as we see in the movies. There were 5 phones with really long cords, in the ground where all the inmates were. I had to wait a lot for a free one. There was no hand sanitizer or any other way to clean the phones. I wasn’t able to call my lawyer because his office had an automated phone system that wasn’t compatible with the jail phone system so when I called home, there were already neighbors there helping my family. One of my neighbors asked how she could help and I asked if she could call the lawyer, which she promptly did after I gave her the information.

I was taken to talk to a nurse who asked about any meds that I needed and a little after that I was taken to an isolated cell where there was a man who seemed angry and troubled. He was taken away a few minutes after he told me that another guy smashed his head against that same wall I was laying on. A lady came and started to ask about the antidepressant that I take for my ADHD, she wanted to know if I was depressed, presented risk to myself, etc. She finally broke the protocol, apologized and asked why I was there. When I explained, she opened her eyes in total disbelief, took her mask off and said: “Prayers are on your way. Don’t worry, you’ll be out of here soon and you are going to write a book about this. Make sure you talk to every single news station what’s happening to you. I will recommend the administration to hold you in the booking area so you don’t have to stay in a cell with criminals. God bless you!”.

I was taken back down to the booking area where I could see my wife one last time before she was taken to a cell. She told me later that she was on a regular cell, just like in the movies, with bunk beds and lots of women. There was a glass window facing a cell with male inmates, who were constantly knocking on the wall and yelling nasty profanities. She was glad there was a funny, big black lady who would yell right back at the male inmates, which made her feel a little more protected.

Around 1pm someone called my name and took upstairs. I went all the way up praying that they wouldn’t put me in a cell (while I had no idea my wife was at one herself). When I saw my lawyer sitting at a desk, with his wide eyes looking at me. I wanted at the same time to punch him and kiss him. He told me: “Thiago, I’m so sorry this is happening. This was a major f* up. The Judge forgot to send to the Sheriff’s office that the contempt order was revoked. I have an emergency hearing scheduled for 4pm and he will sign your release right away, hold on for a few more hours. I’ll come back to talk to you right after the hearing as I’ll stay here for the whole time. I’m going to talk to your wife now, hang in there!”.

When it was 5:15pm, I saw one of the correctional officers who seemed to be looking for someone and then I saw my lawyer right after him. I thought to myself “Thank you Lord, we’re finally going home”. We went to a private 6x6 room by the bathrooms and he said the hearing went well, the judge signed the release order and he already had a copy of it, so now it was just a matter of time for the jail to release us, “Hang in there for a couple more hours”, he said.

It was 6pm when the correctional officers shift ended and new officers arrived. The difference was like night and day. The previous lead officer, was a complete stereotype from any TV show: italian-american white guy, ex-military (my guess is army because of his backpack), arm covered in tattoos. He was a complete jerk who got off at screaming at people for no reason and ignoring any request for help. That room was freezing and my throat started to itch really bad and my ears were hurting. He yelled a profanity at me when I coughed 15ft away from him and he told me to sit at the other side of the room, where all the scary thugs were. The new officer who replaced him, in the other hand, was the complete opposite. His name was Wright and he was a full Florida redneck, with crooked/broken front teeth and thick southern accent. He was probably the nicest law enforcement officer I ever met. One lady decided to give it a shot and see if she could learn something about her case so she approached him from distance and asked, as polite and scared as possible: “Excuse me sir, may I ask you a question?”. He said: “Sure, come over here. He looked her right into her eyes, listened everything she had to say with attention and then sat down at his computer to look her file up. He stand back up and explained everything to her, while looking right into her eyes. I could see how stunned and grateful she was because that was the first time she was treated as a human being, after sitting down there for over 6h in a wheelchair (she had hurt her foot). Another inmate approached, and asked another thing, then another one came and same results. At the time, I thought “that guy is really nice, but let’s see if he’s still that nice to an inmate who’s not white”. Immediately after that thought, I skinny, old, black male approached. The officer was as nice and responsive as he was to the previous inmates, always making eye contact while listening to people. At that point, a line of inmates was formed to talk to that officer, who patiently listened and helped each one of them. 2 hours later, you could easily see the toll that job was taking on him, he was angrier but still respectful and somewhat helpful.

It was 9-something when a lady in a white uniform called me from the “Pre-Trial” window. I went there and she said my wife has just been released and wanted a number of a friend to call to pick her up. I told her that I was waiting to be released too, and even though we had no money or cards with us, I could use my phone to call us an Uber, but she could still call her friend to pick her up and I’d go home once I was released. She said she would wait. It took another hour for me to be released. It was like 10:15pm when I left the building to find my wife sitting on a bench outside, freezing. It was probably like 55° and she said she asked if she could wait in the lobby but they told her that if they allowed her to do that, they would have to allow everyone. We called an Uber and arrived home after 11pm, 16 hours after our misfortune started.

The reason why the cops broke into our house pointing guns to our faces and arrested us in front our daughter in a way all our neighbors could see? In 2014 when we moved to Orlando from Miami, we rented a house where we lived for 4 years until we finally bought our dream home. When we ended the contract, I was naive enough to not have an attorney do an inspection with the landlord and have everything signed and documented before I gave him back the keys. I waited for almost 30 days to get my deposit back but what I got instead was a lawsuit asking for $10k in property damages (almost half of that was “cleaning fees” and the rest was damages caused by Hurricane Irma to the garage door and improvements that I made, like replacing old outlets and the sprinkler box to newer “smart” options). The claims were so insane, and I was so sure of it, that I decided to defend myself instead of spending money with a lawyer, after all, I just bought a big expensive house and I needed save all the money I could. Turns out, the US Judicial System is total and utterly garbage (sorry folks, you know it’s true), and my former landlord’s owner used a resource called “Motion to Summary Judgment” right before our hearing. That basically means that if you don’t follow a specific procedure or ritual to question that motion, the Judge has no other choice but approve it, which means you lost your case without even going to trial. With that motion, my former landlord added another $10k in “administrative fees” for all the time he had to spend going to court and $32k in attorney fees, increasing by debt to $52k. After that it was 2 years of the cat and mouse game, where they blocked bank accounts, tried wage garnishment from my employers, tried to take away our vehicles or anything of value we had. Since neither of those things worked, they started asking insane amounts of paperwork through the Court until there was one document that we didn’t have: the financing contract from my wife’s car, that we bought in 2017. They filed a motion to contempt with the Judge and since we didn’t have that paper they filed something called a “writ of bodily attachment”, which basically is an arrest order.

My new lawyer said that the only way around that now was to either pay the $52k or to file for bankruptcy. I chose the latter option, but even though we hated the idea to open all our financials up, it was still better than paying $52k to a crook. My lawyer filed a motion to cancel that writ (called quash in legal terms) directly to the bankruptcy judge and he agreed to it but he gave us until March 24th because he wanted the county Judge to also agree to it. We got a hearing for March 24th set up but it was cancelled because both lawyers agreed to cancel that writ since we already had a payment plan set up with the bankruptcy court. Unfortunately the Judge “forgot” to send that information to the Sheriff’s office and everything happened.

Wanna know something curious about everything? The Judge signed the order to arrest me and my wife 3 days before Christmas and the police executed that order 3 days before Easter. I don’t believe in coincidences and yesterday was another proof of how great our God is. We know this was all part of his plan and I think I now finally found my calling. I want to fight against the insane injustice that happened to our family and that happens to many other families in our country.

Do I blame the police officers who broke into my house? No, as they said, they didn’t pick up our names from a hat and decided to ruin our day. They were told to do that by a Judge and their protocol on HOW to do that was defined by the Orange County Sheriff.

I’d like to share something I learned yesterday, specifically to all our social justice warriors, black lives matter and defund the police militants: America DO have a systemic problem but it’s not racial, it’s judicial. The majority of people we saw yesterday did not belong in jail. There were people of all races (the majority was white and hispanic). There was a guy there who spend the whole day wearing a jumpsuit because he was driving without a license, another one was there for 12h because his wife locked him into his house and he pushed her while he tried to open the door to leave. One woke up with the police kicking his door because he failed to appear to court after he was arrested for smoking marijuana. There was an old man, probably in his late 60’s, with a broken nose and blood all over his face, screaming in demonic voices until he was sedated and then looked like a plant for the rest of the day. Lots of mentally ill and junkies who didn’t belong in prison. This has to change. Our laws have to change and they can’t be “one size fits all”. A guy who failed to show up at court is not the same as a rapist. A person who steals 1lb of chicken is not the same as a serial killer. People need to be heard before they’re forced to the humiliation and exposure of wearing a jumpsuit and nasty flip flops.