Woman takes care of neighbor problem Florida-style: has their trailer bulldozed

There are a couple of options when your neighbors are a problem.  I’ve had to deal with this.  I’ve exercised some of the options.  You can talk to them. You can let them know you’re calling the police if they are way too loud.  If you’re renting, you can call the landlord, if they have the same landlord. If you have different landlords, you can move.  Or you can use the nuclear option and have their home demolished.  I’ve never used the nuclear option.  Nor have I had the sad-face mug shot that Ana Maria Moreta Folch of St. Augustine has in the picture to the left.

Moreta Folch, with the sad face

According to the Florida Times Union, Moreta Folch didn’t like her neighbors because she thought they were unsavory and thought they broke into her car.  So she called a demolition company and told them that she owned the trailer next door needed it bulldozed along with its septic tank.  That’s the nuclear option.  She pulled the trigger.

The company started demolishing, apparently without checking for ownership papers, and the actual owners came home mid-destruction and called the 5-0. 

Had Moreta Folch called the police first, about the neighbors alleged shenanigans, she might not have been the one facing a third-degree felony, which seems kind of light for having someone’s house demolished.  Self-help usually doesn’t work.  However, if the dude doesn’t get a new trailer and move back next to her, and she gets out relatively light, it could be a win for her. We’ll see.

Head of Texas Sex Offender Agency Resigns After Housing Dozens of Violent Sex Offenders in Residential Neighborhood (with no warning to neighbors)

In the annals of public relations by a government office, the case of Allison Taylor may be a cautionary one in public policy schools for years to come.  Let’s think of the worst thing you could do as a government agency to make people mad.  I’m not talking about the government deciding to rustle up 500 cows from a rancher who owed the BLM $1 million for grazing fees he abjectly refused to pay (here’s looking at you Cliven Bundy – pay your grazing fees and shut up). 

 

Home were 24 violent sex offenders were sent to live

No, how about this:  you run the state agency in charge of supervising high-risk sex offenders after they finish serving their prison sentences, and you decide to house two dozen of them in  a house in a residential neighborhood, and not tell anyone.

According to the Houston Chronicle: Taylor had overseen the “Office of Violent Sex Offender Management that oversees the residential programs for about 350 sex offenders kept in state custody because of the severity of their crimes” since about 2003.  These are people that a fair percentage of Texans would just as well like to see shot on sight.

Taylor’s downfall started when she decided to move 24 of these high risk offenders out of a half-way house in Pasadena, Texas (an industrial Houston suburb) to the Acres Homes neighborhood in north Houston (an area with plenty of kids) without any notice to residents or area lawmakers.  When the neighbors found out about it, there was immediate uproar.  It also came out that Taylor’s office had decided to build a prison camp-like center in rural Liberty County (just northeast of Houston) to house 50 to 100 offenders without any notice to local officials.  Reaction to that was swift as well.

In some respect, I understand whatever frustration she had in her job.  It’s the ultimate NIMBY. No one wants these guys in their neighborhood, at all.  There is nowhere in the state where there is not someone who will protest that a violent sex offender is going to be housed.  But putting 24 in a residential neighborhood was too much.  Maybe she feared for the lives of the former convicts.  Maybe she was just fed up with trying to do her job and not having anywhere for the violent sex offender ex-convicts to live.  Either way, plunking them down in populated areas was either going to get her fired, or them shot, or both.  She got fired from her job and took a different one with the state.  To date, no news about any of the sex-offenders having been shot by the local population.

It’s a hard question, though. Where do you house violent sex offenders when they get out of jail. The guys in north Houston are in “civil confinement” a program that supposedly is intended to transition offenders out of confinement once they complete rehabilitation, but no one ever has in 15 years.  (See Chronicle story).   In Florida, there is a community on the edge of the Everglades where they live, away from everyone else, called Miracle Village.  (see story here). 

In Texas, there’s got to be a place far away from everyone else, where no one will complain.  At that point, though, they’d literally be in the middle of nowhere. There’s no miracle village in north Houston.  There doesn’t appear to be one on the make in Liberty County.  For now, in Texas, no one wants to live next to the hundreds of violent sex offenders who’ve been let out of prison.  I don’t blame them.  I don’t either.

Mexican Navy Intercepts Chinese Ship with 68,000 Tons of Cartel Iron Ore

The State of Michoacán in southwestern Mexico is almost in civil war.  The Knights Templar drug cartel, a remnant of La Familia Michoacán, is being attacked by self-defense forces, and the Mexican Army.  The Knights Templar had almost unlimited de facto control over the State for years.  When the population rose up initially, there was the question of what would cause otherwise law-abiding people to take up gun against an organized criminal enterprise.  The answer came out, in part, when the Mexican government captured Knights Templar operatives with a refrigerated van full of teenagers who were kidnapped and being held for organ harvesting. Seriously, see here.  The cartels were kidnapping children to harvest their organs. And there were reports of the cartel thugs coming into towns to steal girls to send north as prostitutes.  (See here)

 

Iron ore mine in Michoacan

The Mexican army got involved late last year, somewhat tentatively, then for real early this year.  In December, we posted commentary on an article linking the cartel to theft of iron ore, shipping the iron ore to China, and the cartel receiving the precursor chemicals for methamphetamine back.  (see here)  

The second largest port in the country is in Michoacán state, and it had apparently been put under the control of the cartel.  While the story may have seemed like hyperbole, it was not.  Last week, the Mexican navy stopped a Chinese freight ship coming out of that same port with 68,000  tons of iron ore with no legitimate source documents. See here, BBC article. 

The government has, since January, seized 200,000 tons of iron ore from cartel controlled mines. The iron ore had come from a Cartel controlled mine and was being sold on the black market to Chinese buyers.  There is obviously no tax being paid on this iron ore.  The natural resources of the country are being pillaged and sold overseas.

Michoacán State was the site of the first outbreak of the drug war in Mexico a decade ago.  It also stopped there for a time until the self-defense forces sprang up.  There may be many reasons that the government got involved.  The two primary ones seem to be that the government realized that the people were protecting themselves and all-out civil war was about to start, and that the cartel was actually pillaging the countryside, taking resources and not paying taxes on it.  It’s anyone’s guess which of those cause the government to act.