I'm excited to share the story with everybody. Are you excited to very much? So? Well, I think I'm first on the list to read YEP, So we'll go ahead and get it going. I've been a small town cop for twelve years. There's one case that still scares me. Being a cop in a small town in Minnesota probably isn't the most exciting career there is, but it's not bad either. It's actually a relatively peaceful and safe line of work compared to being in law enforcement in one of the big cities New York or LA, for example, where all. The action is is. They would say, there's only around ten thousand people in the town where I live. It's way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of open farmland, and the only real crime that ever occurs as pretty minor stuff. The occasional rowty rednecks getting into fist fights, teenagers vandalizing, petty theft, the odd drunk driver here, and then a case of disorder, really conduct here and there, a were breaking and entering, and then a couple of times I've been to some more serious stuff I've had to deal with, like domestic violence, assault, and then robbery. But that's not even that typical. It doesn't really happen that often. Well, that's not entirely true. There was one case that still haunts me. But I'm getting ahead of myself, Like I was saying, I live in a peaceful, little town, boring. Some would even say, the kind of rule out of the way farming community. You've probably driven through on the highway on your way to somewhere more interesting, without even really thinking about it as you pass it by. The kind of place where nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. You've probably thought, and for the most part, you'd be right thinking that. But there's one case I can't get out of my mind, one case that still makes my blood run cold whenever I think about it. One case I can't explain, no matter how hard I'd try to rationalize it to myself. What happened to the old Garrity woman seven years ago. I had been a police officer for five years when it happened in the early spring of twenty fourteen. There were only five cops on the entire police force, me, my partner Jerry Pete, and Vance, who both worked a night patrol, and the police chief, plus Karen, an older woman who is a retired librarian and worked part time as the dispatcher. The police department was located in the town building. It consisted of two offices, one for the chief, then an open work area for the rest of us. There are three jail cells in the rear, and the three of them were never all occupied at the same time. It was an overcast, rainy afternoon in late March early April. Me and Jerry were in our cruiser on a routine patrol around town when Karen's voice came over the radio telling us there was a possible ten eighty two in progress at the Garrity House on Turner Road. We acknowledged then change directions heading to the Garrity House. I wasn't overly concerned about the call. I already had a pretty good idea who made it Allen Garrity was an older woman who was a widow who lived in a Rundown farmhouse on the outskirts of town. She was probably around sixty five or seventy years old and had lived a lone since her husband had died of a stroke three years before. They had two children, but both of them lived out of town and never visited her Since her husband's death, she had developed something of a reputation of being crazy. Okay, I guess that's not putting it so nice. She was a shut in who rarely left her home and had groceries delivered once a week. Basically a crazy cat lady minus the cats. The reason she was considered crazy was because she had become pretty blaky and paranoids since being widowed, and had called the police department on multiple occasions for everything from hearing intruders moving around in her attic to see in UFOs in the cornfield. There were probably at least a dozen other calls too. All her calls turned out to be false alarms. Of course, the robbers she claimed were hiding in her attic turned out to be a pair of raccoons that had slipped in under the roof. The UFOs were probably just jets flying overhead from the National Guard base fifty miles west me. Jerry, Pete and Vance had all visited her home multiple times before during our respective shifts. We never got frustrated with her or gave her a hard time about it, and usually we would inspect her house and property to calm her nerves. She'd relax, think us, we'd leave, and the process would repeat itself in a couple of weeks or maybe a couple months. Honestly, our infrequent trips to her house were probably the only real highlight of what was a rather dull and unexciting job. When we told the chief about missus Garretty's latest emergency bigfoot was sneaking around in her yard, or there was a giant and a conda lurking in her basement, he would just shake his head sadly. When Vance and. Pete were the ones who had to deal with her, they'd tell us all about the most recent ordeal. When me and Jerry saw them at shift exchange, they'd usually smirk and a mean spirited away, and Pete would twirl his finger next to his temple before they left, symbolizing that she's crazy. Jerry and I just felt sorry for the old woman. It couldn't have been easy for her, a frail, nervous, lonely woman living all alone in that old, crumbling house with no friends or close family. I suspect she might be getting sen nile, or maybe entering the early stages of Alzheimer's or dementia. We worried about her living out there by herself, almost a mile from the nearest neighbor. If her health suddenly turned bad or she had an accident, couldn't call for help, Well, there wasn't really much we could do about it. A couple of times I looked at the numbers of her daughter and son and tried calling them about possibly placing her in an assistant living home or a mental health facility. But the one time I actually managed to reach her son, as I was explaining his mother's situation to him, he interrupted me, telling me he was too busy at the moment and would call me back, then abruptly ended the call. He never did call me back. From then on, they always happened to be unavailable and never answered any of the voicemails I left them. It's just such a said like turn of events for someone later in life too, you know, start to lose their faculties, and then you know their family isn't even around to like help them or at least call them down, And it's all up to these small town police that she keeps calling to try to make something of it. You know, first of all that the introduction is the hardest read of the whole thing. It's the longest and hardest, But just going back to the community and the area, it really feels like like the place that we're from, you know, this small town. I think they even worked. I think he worded it as you'd be you'd like pass by on your way to go somewhere more interesting. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of the rural area that you know, we live in. So I could kind of relate to that. Yeah, say, it's a little bit smaller this story, but I could kind of relate to what he was saying though. Yeah, I mean it kind of right. Uh, Like you said the towns that we lived in then, so the areas you know, there was only one cop in one of the towns we lived in, you know, yeah, and so it was just, uh, you know, if you lived in those areas, you know the feeling, you know, the feeling of how these people react, you know, the way that there usually is someone kind of by themselves that probably get in. You probably know everybody too, right, Like, yeah, a small place, you know everybody, you know their story. Oh yeah, you'll know most of the people in the town if it's small enough, like you know, We've been in towns that were six hundred people and yeah, you knew what was there for. Yeah, so it seems like this is that kind of place. Uh So there the old lady. Garretty keeps calling them, and there's a couple of different patrols, right, there's him and Jerry. Him and Jerry are the day shift, the peen advance of the night shift, I believe, Yeah, And it kind of sounds like they both approach this lady differently, like, yeah, they on the day shift are a little bit more kind of the night shift are a little bit more I don't know, mean joking about it, but it seems like he really relates to this lady, like not even really relates to her. He really feels for her, I guess, is. What I'm saying. Yeah, he understands that she's not all there and she can't help it, and he just feels bad about it. So even tried calling the family members, What. Did you feel about how did you feel about those family members? Not even like just blowing her off? You know, it's just it's really, like I said, it's a sad state of affairs, Like you know, it's just like how could you let that happen. You know, you have your mother by herself, and if that's going on, you got to step. Up obviously if you're just if you're just now tuning in, she's widowed, widowed, her husband passed away to say, three years ago at least, so she's trying to manage and take care of herself, take care of this old farmhouse. And they think possibly developing dementia or some sorts. She frequently calls the cops for false alarms. They're very used to it, even give some examples of thought intruders are in her house. It was raccoons in the attic, Ufo Bigfoot. So it makes you wonder is she calling She calling to get I don't want to say attention, but you know it's probably not intentional. But if your mind's starting to go, you're by yourself, you might call just to have some sort of interaction with a person. But beyond that, she probably does think she see these things, and she's scared because she's by herself. A mile away from the closest neighbor. So it's clear that, you know, she just gets worried and scared out there by herself, and she would needs someone to be there for her. Did a great job I think setting the stage here for the first part of the story we know kind of like that was a quick, good description of you know, the situation. Then of course you're going to jump back into it with you that follow. Jeff Townsend media sees you good night, and the question is do I stay here? Will you be back? Are you gonna come back? Will you be back? Are you coming back
