Family sees normalcy flee through fence

It was Wednesday afternoon in a split level home on Drury Court in Liberty Lake, not long before Greg Wilcox’s wife and children entered the final stretch of their drive home from day care – past manicured lawns and homes that list for $270,000, past everything the Wilcoxes like about The Cottages, an upper-middle-class network of cul-de-sacs.

Greg, who works at home, was just finishing a late afternoon shower, just drying off when he heard the curtains come crashing down in his daylight basement.

He headed for the basement expecting a mess, expecting maybe that the roofers, who’d been patching holes in his roof after howling winds, were working again. Instead, he watched two men flee his home; one was still scrambling through a west window.

“I took off for the front door and watched them run through a hole in the fence,” Greg said. “I saw at least three people out there.”

Through the hole and into a neighbor’s house the men ran. The home, 23119 E. Boone Ave., has been a frequent stop for Liberty Lake police in the past year, court documents show. On Jan. 24, the day of the burglary, officers entered the home through a window with permission of the owner’s teenage son. They found 18-year-old Cameron Lee Bowman lying on a bed and arrested him on suspicion of burglary based on Greg’s witness account. They found Joshua Allyn Munro, also 18, seated on a toilet in the upstairs bathroom with his hands on his head positioned for handcuffs.

Had the day’s events stopped then, there might have been a chance that the Wilcoxes’ lives could have returned to normal. They could have fortified their sliding vinyl windows – which turned out to be so easy to remove the burglars had managed to do so without so much as a scratch – and continued on.

But, as Greg and neighbors not tied to the Boone house can attest, there was more. Neighbors, who feared retaliation if identified, described 23119 E. Boone Ave. as a teen hangout. Munro, who police say also possessed a drug pipe, listed the Boone address as his own, though the homeowner, Diane McDaniel, told authorities he was staying there temporarily. McDaniel’s teenage son knows the suspects.

A group of teenagers at the house after police drove away with Munro and Cameron proceeded to taunt Greg for having their friends arrested. As Wilcox spoke with neighbors, the teens mooned him, gave him the finger, called him every four-letter word in the book and dared him to come onto the property so they could fight.

The Wilcoxes called the police back to speak with the unruly teens. All they wanted was to get back to normal, to set the “way-back” machine to that split second before their lives went to hell. They wanted the peace of mind of knowing no one would be crawling through their now busted fence, that Greg wasn’t going to be threatened with a beat down whenever he went outside.

Neighborhood history suggested to the Wilcoxes that things weren’t going to get better. Six months earlier, police had been called to the Boone home after a neighbor complained that the windows in his van had been smashed out with rocks, according to police reports. Not long after, officers were pulling over two carloads of teens for driving at night in the wrong lane down Boone with their headlights off. Three of the kids were cited for possession of alcohol. One of the teens told police he got the alcohol from the home on Boone.

And in a bizarre incident even earlier, Greg went out to his driveway one morning and found his garage door and car splattered with pizza, pickles and purple house paint. A faint trace of purple paint is still visible on the Wilcoxes’ garage door, like a nagging bruise that won’t go away.

After the burglary incident, Greg started taking a gun with him out to the curb to get the mail.

He wasn’t looking to shoot anyone, he just didn’t know what to expect after finding someone in his house and then being challenged to a fight for doing something about it.

Eventually he put the gun away, at the encouragement of the police. The Wilcoxes went to the Spokane County Courthouse to see whether they could file some civil anti-harassment orders to get a little security back.

They sat in a courtroom, filling out hand-written narratives about folks next door. Narratives are a requirement for anyone seeking an anti-harassment order. It’s hard to tell your story if you’re a crime victim, Greg said later; every time you do, you relive it. Your heart may flutter; your blood pressure may spike. A nervous perspiration rises on your skin, as if that story were a toxin your body needed to expel.

In the courtroom where the Wilcoxes scrambled to fill out their forms before the government shut down for the day, they learned that each order they requested would cost $53. They needed eight. They weren’t thrilled about paying more than $400 to keep the people next door at a distance.

They were less thrilled about filling the forms out for the under 18 crowd that challenged Greg to a fight. The restraining orders the Wilcoxes filled out required their harassers be named, but police told Greg they couldn’t release the names of the teens that harassed him because they were juveniles.

And the court commissioner told the Wilcoxes they’d need to show a pattern of harassment by every person for whom they filled out an order. One night of taunting probably wasn’t going to do it. Their afternoon at the courthouse had brought Greg’s wife, Jade, to tears.

The court was getting ready to close and the Wilcoxes weren’t even close to getting what they wanted.

The couple had made the mistake of asking court administrators what they should do and received the standard answer, that justice administrators, for reasons of impartiality and liability, cannot give legal advice. Greg was disgusted.

“I can’t tell you verbatim what I said,” he later recalled. “But my thoughts in my mind were ‘I can see why people take it into their own hands.’ “

Driving home from the courthouse that night, down that home stretch past everything the Wilcoxes like about The Cottages, Greg spotted one patrol car parked on Boone Avenue, then another. Based on Greg’s parting remarks at the courthouse, the court commissioner had called police, fearing the worst.

The police on Boone, Greg said, asked him, “Do you have any weapons on you right now?” He couldn’t believe how far from normal things had drifted.

“And I got the luxury of feeling like a perpetrator,” he said.