By Michael D. Martin, E.C.P.D.
Retired
About the author...Michael Martin (pictured front row, far right in the
1981 photo) is a retired veteran of 25 years on the Eden City Police
Department, and has penned a number of anecdotal writings recalling his
experiences.
XII. The Raid in Grande Oaks
During my time as Chief of detectives, we had a lot of success because my
boys would whip out a legal search warrant and search a place or home in
half a heartbeat and more times than not, we found something. We had a
little fella who lived in Grande Oaks who, over a period of time, managed to
burglarize nineteen homes. We used to see him out walking at all times of
the night but most of the burglaries were daytime burglaries, when folks
were at work.
A lot of the burglaries were not even reported until
this investigation was in full swing. We finally got a real break when
neighbors saw him crawling thru a window. We drew a search warrant for his
home to look for stolen items.
Detectives Skip Johnson, Barry Carter, Buddy Moretz
and Robbie Price and I went to the home to execute the search warrant and we
took along some fellas from the uniformed division so there would not be any
misunderstanding about who we were. We knocked on the door and the woman of
the house answered the door and passed out cold in the floor before we could
finish reading the order of search. We stepped over her and finished reading
the order of search to other adults in the house. We had the other people
sit in the living room as we proceeded to search the residence.
There was no electricity in the house and it was
pretty well filled with cockroaches. Robbie Price and I went into the
kitchen area and there was a dish on the table with a hunk of Spam in it.
There were six or seven cockroaches chowing down on the Spam, There was a
hole in the wall near the floor that rats had worn smooth coming in and out,
I told Robbie that it seems we might be here a while and maybe he might to
wake the woman up so she could make us some spam sandwiches.....Robbie got
pale and said "I'll pass cap" We were looking at the rat hole
when we heard Skip yelp in the other room and we charged into the living
room expecting trouble, there was none but Skip was standing in front of a
door looking sick. Skip tried to say "don't go in there Captain"
but he did not get it out clear before I had opened the door and started
in....then it hit me, the stench. This was the bathroom and evidently it had
not been in working condition for months. No one fixed it and they kept
using it. I staggered back, gagging and closed the door.
The uniform guys left for the yard, they had had
enough. We went into the suspects bedroom and noted the kid did not even
have a bed to sleep on, just some metal springs with coats on it. Now I knew
why the kid walked all night. We noted that at every electric wall socket
and switch, there were signs of electric burns that blackened the area
nearby. Back in the kitchen, we opened the cabinets to find more cockroaches
and under the sink, there was no plumbing, just a green plastic bucket full
of some kind of fermenting green slime that they emptied out the back
door. When we were leaving, we heard a pitiful whelp of a dog and found the
saddest little fella in the world had been imprisoned in the crawl space to
deal with the rats. We tried our best to deal with all of this. That, my
friends, is why your police sometimes get a bad attitude.