PROLOGUE

 

My wife and I went through an unexpected, bizarre, and frightening ordeal. Never in our wildest imaginings did we expect anything like this to happen to law-abiding citizens like ourselves. And as the crisis proceeded and progressed in its intensity, my wife and I reached the unfortunate conclusion that our faith, and our naïve trust, in America’s legal and justice system was misplaced. We had expected to be treated fairly and justly by our community, our society, and those who serve to protect us. That didn’t happen.

The event changed us profoundly. The two of us will never be the same again. Nor will our lives or our lifestyle.

My goal for writing this book is to make sure what happened to my wife and me — an experience that went further awry because of a naiveté and unfamiliarity that is common in the general population with the workings of the legal and justice systems — is not the kind of experience that ever happens to you or beloved members of your family.

But before I reveal what we underwent, I feel it’s best to provide you with a little personal history as to who I am, and where I come from. This way, you can understand and appreciate who I am. Who my wife is. You’ll have the benefit of knowing that my wife and I never had any negative experience with the legal/justice system prior in our lives. Indeed, by the time our crisis happened, we were both in our later years, having lived rich, full and what most would term as “normal” lives.

I was born in New York City in 1949 to Eastern European parents. I lived there until I was fifteen. I then spent the next twelve years in or around Philadelphia, and I received my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976.

After that, I spent time doing post-doctoral work in several places, including Nashville, where I met my wife, Carol, and where we married in 1983. It was a second marriage for each of us, and we were thrilled to have found our lifelong partner.

We moved to Galveston, Texas, where we would happily spend the next twenty-two years. I had accepted a position as a faculty member in the physiology department of a medical school there. I would be doing muscle research there, and for much of that time Carol would work for me as a research associate (technician).

On the island of Galveston, we led an idyllic existence. With our new home just two blocks away from the lab where we worked, we had no commute. This new location allowed us to go home for lunch every day. Spending so much time together in a laidback community on the shore was like a dream. We cherished our time there.

Sadly, that time came to end. Carol and I made the difficult decision we had to move upon receiving the news that our institution was building a Bio-Safety Level 4 facility less than a block from where we worked eight hours a day. Worse, its location was only three blocks away from where we lived!

Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) indicates that the facility is considered safe enough to work with the most dangerous microbes known to man, including anthrax, Ebola, smallpox, and bubonic plague. While Carol and I had no concerns about the safety of such microbes within the Safety Level 4 building, we had real concerns about the individuals who would be working with such organisms. At the time, we heard true stories of some researchers’ cavalier attitudes that affected how those researchers handled these microbes. The news shocked us to our cores.

For example, one researcher was failing to declare the vials of such microbes when traveling on well-known commercial airline flights! (Fortunately, the authorities uncovered what was going on, and stopped this behavior.) And the news was just as bad when it came to those researchers who lived close to us: One neighbor was taking the microbes home and storing them in his home freezer (much to his own wife’s dismay).

Carol and I were unable to fathom why such researchers felt that they knew better than the regulators as to what was safe. Due to how they were handling these specimens, they were potentially exposing others to fearsome, worrisome, and often fatal diseases.

Compounding our concern over this situation was the fact that our town of Galveston was located on the tip of a barrier island. The island only had two bridges and a ferry leading to the mainland. In the event of any microbe leak, authorities on the Texas mainland would quarantine the island — thereby forcing its inhabitants to endure continual exposure to potentially lethal microbes in order to protect those on the more populated mainland. While we understood that this would be done to help prevent the spread of disease, Carol and I were not comfortable about being put at risk like this because of where we lived.

Another new factor influencing us to move was the arrival of a new department chairman. He was one of the most disagreeable individuals I have ever known, and his presence was greatly reduced the pleasure I derived from my day-to-day work.

So when the opportunity arrived, I jumped at the invitation to join the University of East Kansas for Medical Sciences (UEKMS) in Big Pebble. This was in the late summer of 2005. This institution had just recruited two senior cardiovascular researchers with whom I had been collaborating, and accepting the position offered me a rare opportunity to change institutions as a senior faculty member.

Carol and I promised each other that we would attempt to continue the kind of lifestyle we so cherished on Galveston Island by living close to my new workplace. Still, it was not without some trepidation that we agreed on the move.

Moving would be an extremely difficult transition for Carol. She and I had landscaped our home in Galveston together, and taking my avid-gardener-of-a-wife away from her homegrown and conceived garden was similar to yanking a favorite well-rooted plant out of the ground.

However, we went to tour our potential new community, and found a neighborhood in Big Pebble very close to my new workplace that seemed suited to us. There was a very nice house for sale that was just a ten-minute walk away from the building I would be working in. To this day, I believe Carol and I would not have moved had we not found and purchased that house.

Late in the summer of 2005, we moved to 341 Pearly Lane in Big Pebble. While we hired movers to take care of getting most our things there, we had a vast number of exotic and grown plants that we had put in ourselves and nourished for years. We did not want to leave these treasured and sentimental specimens behind. So we dug up and moved a lot of our plants to Big Pebble ourselves, via a U-Haul truck. It took three separate overnight drives from Galveston to get those plants to Big Pebble, but it was worth it.

So it would be Carol and me, two cats, and dozens of our plants that would call our place in Big Pebble “home.”

Our new community welcomed us — even before we were settled in. Neighbor Johnny Boyle approached after my first plant haul, and offered to keep the plants watered when he discovered I would be making more trips back to Galveston to get the rest. And after another one of those plant hauls, neighbor Tina White, came over to greet me.

Tina lived right across the street from us, where our two houses abutted at an intersection. She seemed friendly enough at the time, although she and I did not have much in common. Tina was a mom in her late thirties raising three kids, two boys and a girl, with her husband William. She was attractive, and always dressed in the latest fashions. She and Carol started to speak often, and after telling Carol she was a photographer, she showed her some of her work. Carol told me it was quite artistic.

Tina’s husband William was an environmental lawyer in his forties. He regularly supervised the kids in the afternoon when he came home, most often keeping his attention on the two youngest children, Wayne and Missy.

Tina told us her son Wayne, a first grader in 2008, was a “special needs child.” My wife found him to be shy, kind, and very considerate. He always called Carol “Mrs. Carol,” and my wife adored him.

Carol didn’t feel the same affection for Missy, the youngest of the three children. She was at the age where she had daily temper tantrums, and her shrieks often echoed across the street.

As for the White’s oldest boy Willie, he was an avid basketball player. He played every day, first in his own yard and then in the intersection (more on that later). Right from the start, Willie never looked Carol quite in the eye, and always tried to avoid her.

 

Moving Pangs

Leaving her home of over twenty years made Carol sad. She was quite attached to the home and its garden, and our lifestyle and community there. So she and I took pains to spend a lot of our first year at Pearly Lane fixing up the house and yard to her liking. Carol had a sprinkler system installed so she could fashion and maintain a garden, which she did. She put in some winter jasmine in front of the house, placing them so the plants would droop prettily over a brick wall toward the sidewalk. In the winter, the jasmine sported spectacular yellow blooms.

She put in many other plantings in the back yard, and that yard blossomed into a real joy for the two of us. Together we planted a potted Japanese maple we were fond of in the back, where it thrived beyond our wildest expectations. I also installed brick paths around the periphery of the back yard and became as proud of the job I did there as I was of brick and stonework I had installed in the yard of our Galveston home.

One of the best parts about our new...