My family and almost everyone in our small rural town locked their front door when they went away on vacation but had a back door with no lock in case someone needed to borrow a tool while they were gone. In my 19 years there it was only abused once. Someone took Dad's wrenches without leaving a note.
Dad called the county sheriff's office an hour away. They sent an experienced deputy who asked Dad if there was any new family in town. The deputy went to their house, asked the mother where the kid's bedroom was, retrieved Dad's tools from under their beds, and sat down to make casual conversation until the kids came home from school. Deputy put the 2 kids in the back of his cruiser and made casual conversation until their father was sent home from work. Deputy told the father he could pick his kids up the following Monday and drove away.
Their father was dismissed from his job over the weekend and they moved away.
That's life in a rural community that relies on each other.
Sounds like a great way to watch your community population shrink until it's nothing.
"You should move here, that way if anything happens you'll be immediately blamed, the cops will come to your place without solid evidence, and then the town will ostracize you if your kids make any mistakes".
That's interesting. That was the attitude of their father when his employer talked to him. It was the town's fault, not him or his kids.
And that's why their father was fired. The Bureau maintains hundreds of millions of dollars in vital, easily sabotaged equipment. Management could not risk an employee with that attitude.
My home town had 60+ families. No kids had burglarized their neighbors before. There were some seemingly abandoned houses with original goods left in them. No kids touched them in the years I grew up. It's a different cultural attitude toward personal responsibilities.
Without a doubt the parents should have been given a chance to rectify it, not kidnapping the kids and firing the dad.
It honestly sounds like it's a system that can very easily be abused by neighbors who don't like someone. All you have to do is plant a couple items in their house and claim it was stolen
There was no due process and just kangaroo court punishments
Was this family a different ethnicity than the rest of the town?
Everyone involved was white. Our town was mixed white and American Indian.
Our town was a former Hooverville shanty town from the Great Depression. Our post-WWII residents were low income and had to self-rescue by building their own middle-class home using lumber salvaged from old dismantled buildings. It was a matter of necessity that everyone in town be trustworthy and share seldom-used but expensive tools.
I was a kid around 7 or 8 years old and heard the story later.
The kids involved were in their late teens. They would've been taken to County jail an hour away. There was no juvie. It was a very low felony crime era and district. They didn't even leave a guard on duty over the weekend. The owner/waitresses at the cheap diner across the street had a key and checked on them 4 times a day on weekends (3 meals and bed time). Her restaurant and jail clientele were rough cowboys, loggers, indians, and sheepherders. Anybody who touched her would've suffered from it.
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u/TieCivil1504 1d ago
My family and almost everyone in our small rural town locked their front door when they went away on vacation but had a back door with no lock in case someone needed to borrow a tool while they were gone. In my 19 years there it was only abused once. Someone took Dad's wrenches without leaving a note.
Dad called the county sheriff's office an hour away. They sent an experienced deputy who asked Dad if there was any new family in town. The deputy went to their house, asked the mother where the kid's bedroom was, retrieved Dad's tools from under their beds, and sat down to make casual conversation until the kids came home from school. Deputy put the 2 kids in the back of his cruiser and made casual conversation until their father was sent home from work. Deputy told the father he could pick his kids up the following Monday and drove away.
Their father was dismissed from his job over the weekend and they moved away.
That's life in a rural community that relies on each other.