For the past 7 months after moving in to my new house with my daughter and dogs the neighbors child who’s 15/16 and has pretty severe downs syndrome has increasingly been entering my property and home.
At first I just talked to the neighbors and they were at first really sorry and vowed to monitor her more while she’s in their backyard. However after a few months they just genuinely do not care anymore and brush it off.
I’ve installed security cameras in the backyard and front yard purely for my own safety insurance wise because we do have a pool.
She will climb the fence into my yard (6′ wooden privacy fence) with a ladder from their shed and let my dogs out. I’ve fixed her letting my dogs “free” as she says by using chains and padlocks on the two gates. Before this became a common occurrence she even would let the dogs out of the house and then “free” them.
Numerous times if my garage door is open she will leave their backyard and just walk into my house to free my dogs. I don’t know what the purpose is other than it’s something she just has to do for whatever reason.
When she climbs into the backyard (sometimes when I’m not even home) and she cannot get back out she begins screaming and crying and just shuts down. Before I started chaining and locking my gates because of her releasing my dogs her parents would just walk in and get her and leave. Now since I’ve chained it they start a huge fit about me having her locked in my backyard and they have to climb the fence, bring the ladder over and carry her back over. Somehow this is my fault.
Now I’m not really blaming her because she mentally doesn’t know any better, she has some very severe issues and she’s damn lucky my dogs are super nice (purebred German Shepard, an English bulldog and a mix Sheppard/bulldog).
I just honestly worry about her safety in the backyard, climbing fences and her seemingly not being watched as she needs to be. I have a pool and if she falls in when I’m not home she could very well drown. That’s why I installed security cameras to cover my own ass if that ever happens, I truly hope it never does but it seems her parents just put her in the backyard and that’s it.
I’ve called the local child and family services office (CPS) several times in the past two months to report it because I feel she is at risk with her parents inattentiveness and their seemingly not caring attitude of her just going into people’s yards, garages, houses etc. I have a full garage of power tools, table saws etc that I’ve now had to resort to flipping the breaker off when I open the doors out of fear she may severely injure herself.
I finally called the cops and asked for an officer to come out because I had questions about an issue I’m having and briefly explained it.
Officer shows up, I invite him in and explain the whole situation. He isn’t really sure what to do about it right now so he asked for a supervisor come to his position. Supervisor shows up and I go over the whole thing again, we go upstairs to my computer where I have all the videos clipped and saved (9 times of her entering the backyard and 4 of her entering the house through the garage).
We watched each one and he gets on his cellphone and goes back to his car. A few minutes later he comes back with 3 flash drives and asks me to copy the videos over to the drive and had me fill out a piece of paper stating what I put on the drive and then signed it, I repeated it all 3 times.
About 45 minutes later after we have been talking and he’s been on and off his cellphone the entire time, 2 CPS workers show up and review the videos again and take a complete statement from me going back to the first time it happened. This took about two hours because they wanted it to be precise and as accurate as I remember it and left out anything I wasn’t 100% sure on.
The officers and CPS workers head next door to talk to the parents, parents apparently shut the door in their faces and said they didn’t want to talk but because of my statement and the videos of her climbing over, getting stuck, having to be carried back over the times I’m at work or gone and just entering the house they had probable cause to enter the home anyways.
After they were inside their house for about 10-15 minutes another cop car shows up followed by another a few minutes later. I’m in my garage so I don’t know exactly what happened inside but after more officers showed up the father was put in the back of a car and the daughter was put into the CPS workers van and they left. The father was driven away about 10 minutes after that, then about an hour later the mother is also put into the back of a car and they drive away.
I talked to the initial officer that showed up and asked for a supervisor and he tells me they found drugs (pills not in prescription bottles/not their prescriptions) and that the home was just not being taken care of inside and definitely not a safe environment for a child. Said they found drugs not secured and in areas the child had access to them.
Source: Reddit
