I am attempting to find some help with a serious problem that nobody seems to care about except me. Yes, I am the one who is mainly affected in this but I don’t know where to turn for assistance trying to right the wrong and put an end to this happening again.

In October of 2010 I was the victim of a fire in the house I inherited 6 years prior from my mother. The problem was that I had no insurance on the dwelling. The last year my mother was alive my sister and I decided to let the insurance lapse and use the money saved to better take care of her needs. I was her full time care provider and thought that after her death I would return to full time employment and reinstate the insurance when I could better afford it. Except after her passing in October 2004 I had trouble finding a job that paid as well as what I made before I left the work force to take care of her. And I fell further behind before I found a decent job and was still catching up when the fire occurred.

So as I found myself with a major mess on my hands I dove in and was doing the best I could. Better than most expected and I was maintaining a positive outlook and saw things getting better. Until I was attacked by an out of control Code Enforcement that was hell bent on destroying me. They went to extremes to turn each of my successes into failures

A few days after the fire I was sitting in the front yard behind the chain link fence fixing a flat tire on my mountain bike when a county car drove up and a wild, screaming bitch jumped out and started in on me. She wanted to know what I was doing and who I was. I told her fixing my tire and I was the owner of the house. She asked my name and after I told her she said that wasn’t the name of the home owner. The house was still under my mom’s name so I pointed out the first name was different but it was the same last name. She screamed some more and found out I was much louder and much more profane than she was and a much more skilled debater. Then a sheriff car pulled up and it nappened to be an officer I recognized who remembered me. He found out what was happening and took the bitch across the street and after a moment he told her to go apologize to me. She wasn’t happy with it but she did and I hung up my cell phone as I was talking to Channel 3 News telling them what was happening. They wouldn’t believe me so I just hung up..

Having no other choice I stayed living in the house during one of the coldest, wettest winters in recent memory. I had boarded up the blown out windows, boarded up the burned doors, covered the roof with a huge tarp, put a chain link fence around the property and had a dumpster in the driveway. I hauled wheel barrow after wheel barrow of ashes, burned wood, furniture, sheet rock, family and personal memorabilia and what ever was in the house out to the dumpster. At night I would wash pictures and then dry them by the fire place or a propane heater. Then I boxed them along with anything else of value – real or sentimental – and stack them in the kitchen area.

I had made the burned out shell of the living room into a shelter by hanging tarps from the rafters around the fire place area where I had a couch and table. Then there were tarps over the walls and blankets and rags stuffed into the cracks keeping the wind from blowing through somewhat. It created a space around me that acted as an insulating barrier. Over time I got each room cleared out and eventually the farthest room back – the master bedroom – was set up with the dresser I had saved and a few other pieces of furniture and the couch which I used as a bed to sleep on. I had 2 dogs at the time and they slept back there with me helping to keep me warm. And my laptop was set up back there which I used daily for writing, researching the internet, communication via email and text messaging, watching programs on Hulu and Crackle and creating a web page.

After salvaging a great deal of photos and other family history and memorabilia and boxing it up for taking to a storage place some time soon I had a big set back. It was sometime around January of 2011 and I had gone to breakfast with the dogs same as I did every morning up to Safeway and MacDonalds. I returned to the house before noon to continue my clean up and arrived to find 2 white vans, one backed into the driveway and the other in the street yet nobody was in the house. But I did find all of the boards I had put over the windows and doors – which were approved by Code Enforcement – yanked down and new plywood nailed into their place. I also found my chain link gate with the lock cut, my tarps all ripped down, the tent out front I used as a shelter in the day to protect things I salvaged was trampled down with my own wheel barrow on top of it. The antique dresser I had in the kitchen that I stored salvaged items in was turned over, the drawers tossed into the living room, the mirror from it tossed and shattered, too, and each and every box of salvaged items tossed onto the floor and into the fire place. Among these items was my mother’s ashes! I was mad enough to kill and planned to do just that as I grabbed my red fiberglass handled ax and went out the front looking for the chicken shit bastards that had done this.

What greeted me was 3 – yes 3! – Sacramento County Sheriff cars each with 2 officers rolling up and heading toward me. They started questioning me and one in particular was a total smart ass who, after asking what I was doing there and I responded that I was cleaning up after the fire said, after looking in the door and seeing the mess, .”Your not doing a very good job!”  If my ax were in my hand at that time he would have found out what a tree feels like when its chopped down…

I was searched, all of my belongings were either thrown on to of the garbage containers or onto the dirt, insulted and belittled and informed that I had a warrant for my arrest for failure to appear on a traffic citation. The court date was about the time of the fire for a ticket I received for driving on a suspended license. Some how I had forgotten the court date in all the turmoil of the fire. I was then told that either I took my dogs and left or I was going to jail. I had no choice but to leave. If it was so important then why would 6 Sheriff let me go free? And nowhere were the 2 Code Nazis that instigated this fiasco. To describe them as chicken shits is more complimentary than derogatory. They were definitely diluting the gene pool.

I was forced off my own property when I should have been given the opportunity to file charges for vandalizing my property. But I left very reluctantly.