Page 303 - NIXBOOK

Apartment manager called 911 to report nobody had seen one of the tenants for a couple weeks, but his car was present in the
parking lot, and the tenant was known to have a lot of serious health problems….so….probably dead.. On my way to the dispatch,
the reporting party called again with an update: “Went to tenant’s front door – smells really bad in there.” Myself and another
officer arrive, and sure enough the area near the front door smells like warm death. Pertinent to this story is the fact it was a
very hot August; temperatures had been 90+ for the past week. The manager hands us the door key and when we opened the
door a thick swarm of giant, well-fed black houseflies go past us, all desperate for air fresher than what was in the dark and
putrid apartment. Yep, the guy is in there and he is two weeks dead on his bed. Alcoholic. As we’re poking around in there
looking for clues (like his most recent alcohol receipts and outgoing phone calls on his phone) I’m breathing through my mouth,
which was slightly better than through my nose, and I kept thinking “If any one of these left over super-sized black flies go into
my mouth, I am going to immediately throw up everything I’ve eaten in the past week.” So I had to keep my mouth covered to
keep the flies away. The coroner showed up to remove the body, but said he’d need some help notifying the next of kin – in this
case, the guy’s ex-wife who was at her nail salon in town. Now, not being a complete moron, I had noticed that there was only
one coroner, and the rotting dead guy was well over 200 bloated pounds. Meaning the coroner was definitely going to need
some help picking up the corpse. In all fairness, I let the other officer have an opportunity to do the next of kin notification but
when he didn’t volunteer after a quarter second I offered to do it. So I left to go tell the lady her ex-husband had died, and missed
the part where the other officer and the coroner peeled the guy off his bed and large chunks of his skin stayed behind, with
crawling maggots in the juices. Actually, I don’t feel like I missed any of that.

I went to a domestic dispute call involving a dad and his teenage daughter, arguing over house rules. The dad pulled me aside
and moaned that his daughter was ungrateful and she should be respecting him more, especially since he had just put $3,000
dollars on his credit card to get her a really good seat at the Brittney Spears concert in Tacoma. Based on what the inside and
outside of the house looked like, there was not enough money in the bank to pay that card off anytime soon.

A vacant house between owners had attracted a family of squatters that we had to keep chasing out. Memorable because the
house had 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, a large indoor swimming pool bigger than the garage, and the whole thing was 5,782 square
feet. Absolute monster of a house. The reason why it was empty was because it had been built in 1975 and it showed; hideous
carpet, hideous walls, doors, and trim and cabinets were all dark wood, the bathrooms had 1970’s vintage toilets and counters
and mirrors…Eventually it was bought by a navy captain who had a couple extra hundred thousand dollars needed to renovate.