When I was fifteen, my family went through an ordeal that none of us will ever forget. My mother and her boyfriend, my older sister and I lived in a large apartment building. There was always a shady character or two hanging around. One night, my sister and a friend were out, and I had decided to turn in early. My mother and her boyfriend were awake in the next room.The next thing I knew, I was awoken by my sister who was telling me that someone had just fallen or jumped out of a fourth-story window--one floor above us. My mother's boyfriend went out to check things out, along with a forming crowd, when the police arrived. He warned us all to stay inside the apartment. After a time, we learned that it was a guy who I had been seeing a while back. Fortunately, he survived the ordeal.
The next day, two plain-clothes detectives came to our door and asked my mother and us girls to come down to the station to answer a few questions. We were of no help to them; my sister was sitting on the stoop at the opposite side of the building at the time of the incident, and the rest of us were inside. As I said, I was sleeping at the time. The detectives escorted us home afterwards.
The next day, they came back to bring us in for questioning. We were puzzled, yet went along in compliance. My mother was brought in first, leaving my sister and me to sit in the hallway. Then, they called me in. As soon as I entered the room, my mother sitting on the opposite side of the room, looked at me. She was crying! One detective told my mother to shut up and turn around. I was really scared; unprepared for what was about to happen.
They asked me to tell them what "really" happened that night. They told me that my mother and sister were sick people who were heading to jail, and that I was on my way to a reformatory for juveniles. They asked me to tell them everything; they knew that we had pushed the guy (get this!--) not out the window, but down the stairs. They made me sign a blank piece of paper. Later I realized that they could have typed a confession on it, but at the time I was so afraid, I didn't want to question them. They read from a supposed statement that the guy gave them, which included my full name. When I truthfully commented that he couldn't pronounce my last name, (he is Portuguese) and called me by a shortened version of my first name, they actually scribbled and rewrote "his" statement.
They sent my mother and me out into the hall while they brought my sis in. I cried hysterically; confused, knowing that we had done nothing wrong, yet terrified knowing that they could put us all away for no reason anyway. We were sent home in the back of a cruiser like criminals. I learned that they had made my sis sign a blank piece of paper also. However, she got it worse than I did; they told her they "knew" how my mother had been "pimping" us off to that guy and others. My friend, who was more streetwise than we were, told me to calm down. She said it was a tactic police used to see if someone was "in cahoots" with whoever really committed a crime. Nevertheless, I feared that I was going to be put away; my mother and sis locked up in prison.
To make matters worse, someone who was also questioned saw us that day with the detectives, and I guess they assumed we had said something about them. They harrassed us, calling us rats and saying things like "snitches get stitches." Not only did we supposedly "committ the crime" we knew nothing about, but now we were "guilty" of providing information we didn't have about someone we didn't know.
Well, it turned out that my friend was right. They never questioned us again. In fact, one of them had the nerve to wave at us from his car a time after. (Mockingly? Probably.) People told us that we should have reported the detectives to someone higher up. I was just happy that it didn't go any further than it did. Of course, if we knew then what our rights were, I wonder if we could have pressed charges.
I'm curious as to what other people think of this.
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