TTSOML #130: In Wenatchee Jail

I was less than 3 months pregnant.

I may have been just 2 months along. I was worried that my upset and panic would affect my baby. I did my best to stay calm, as I didn't want to feel anything or do anything that would harm the baby. I wondered if I was going to lose the baby in a miscarriage because of the shock and stress.

I was also not getting the nutrition I needed. I drank at least 3 cups of milk a day, organic milk, and ate healthy foods, and I wasn't getting enough milk. I told them I was pregnant but they had to confirm before they believed me and then I received the pregnancy diet, which was just as bad, but had a few more fruits and veggies and milk. I told them I didn't take any medications but that I needed a prenatal vitamin. They confirmed this through Stacy Stubblefield, I guess.

I had horrific migraines. They didn't go away with pregnancy but increased, especially with the stress. They refused to take me to a clinic or give me anything for my migraine. I really suffered. At first I was in a bunk room with some other women, and I liked one in particular, who was brilliant but had an abuse story like nobody's business. She was so smart and had such a beautiful figure. Her name was Victoria. She and I were the only ones who could laugh uncontrollably to "The Big Lebowski". She was on meds then and seemed pretty stable but I saw her outside of jail and she wasn't really "okay". I heard what they did to her. I heard how her "criminal record" started with a misdemeanor of something she didn't do, but her PD pressured her to take it. Once it was on her record, it was downhill from there. She was discredited from the start, with a "past". I heard so many stories and some sounded like excuses, but I could tell other stories were legitimate. People were taking guilty pleas just to avoid jail time, when they were innocent. They thought it was the easier route, and it was--short term, and yet it had long-term consequences to their futures.

Some of the women disliked me. They claimed they didn't like the fact that I was using up all the paper. For kites. Well, no one else was. I found out you could write these things, called "kites" to the Judge. A "kite" was a request for relief on some kind of legal grounds. If the bail was excessive, you could write a kite. If you hadn't seen a lawyer yet, you could write a kite. All kites had to be filed, but a Judge could refuse to agree to the request. Nevertheless, they were required to be filed.

We had dull pencils that were about 4 inches long, to write with. I started writing kites.

About this time, I started getting mistreatment from guards, some in particular. There was one hispanic guard who swore all the time, and who harassed me. I had no idea why he went after me, but he did, and some of the female inmates and him would motion towards me.

After a few days, the guards moved me to "the hole". They claimed I was going to get beat up if they didn't. Victoria was silent. She was the only halfway normal non-convict type there, who really just had some psych issues, but wasn't a criminal at all. When I was moved to "the hole", I was told to take my things.

My things were just paper and pencil, and there was only one decent book in the entire place. It was "Chocolat". I also asked for a Bible. Anything in the Bible was better reading than the Harlequins lying around. I'd had my fill of Harlequin when I was a young girl.

In solitary confinement, I wrote. All the kites my cellmates had seen me write and file, were being returned to me. Judge Warren was refusing to file them. I went to the "law library" of statutes, and saw several reasons for writing kites. Every single one was refused filing. My goal was to get these things on the public record, where maybe someone could check my case and see what I was documenting as illegal or improper. I guess Judge Warren thought it would be damaging because he refused to file them. I told the guards, the Judge MUST file them. Then I got a stack back with a post-it note from a clerk which said the Judge had instructed them they could not be filed.

There were no obscenities in the kites. They were written in a formal, business/legal narrative, like motions. I had experience doing this, and that's what I did. I wrote one or two page kites. What Judge Warren did, in refusing to file these kites, was illegal. But he did it anyway, just like he illegally put out an order that my license was suspended and then refused to correct it, even when the law was pointed out to him and one of his own clerks was whispering to me over the phone about him.

The guards started to refuse to take out my trash. It was a tiny cell, and I had no place for trash. After they wouldn't do this, I finally flushed a well-chewed apple core. The apple core got stuck and clogged the plumbing. They didn't want to fix this either, but I said it was unsanitary and I was pregnant and I didn't want to write a complaint about the sanitation problems. So all of a sudden, someone is fixing the toilet and they found my apple core. They didn't want to give me apples after that, but I asked for them because I needed the fruit. I said I hadn't meant to clog the plumbing and thought it would go down fine, and no one was taking my trash away.

I remember looking all around, to see if there was any way to escape.

Other than writing kites, I documented other things, and I thought up a nursery scheme for my baby, and names, and I read the book Chocolat, which made me cry. The woman in the book is a free spirit like me, I thought, and she has a daughter as a single mother. I was thinking about naming my daughter, if I had a girl, after the name in the book.

It was a very long time before I saw a lawyer. I got on the phone and demanded to see someone. They told me, over the phone, it would be TWO WEEKS before a PD could see me. I yelled, "I'm PREGNANT! I need to see a lawyer NOW!" And then they sent someone over within a few days. I was held for 14 days in the jail, as an innocent person falsely charged with a misdemeanor.

Towards the end, I had a guard or two open my door to threaten me. One made a serious threat of harm and it frightened me.

In the very beginning, when you go before the Judge to plead "guilty" or "not guilty", I asked, without an attorney present, for "personal recoginanze". Every single inmate there thought it was a sure thing. It was a first time thing, and it was a misdemeanor. Personal recoginanze is when someone awaits trial outside of jail and just attends the hearings. It was a given. But when I went before Judge Warren, to the shock of everyone, he refused. He snarled and said I needed to stay in jail.

I asked my family if they would bail me out and they wouldn't. I couldn't believe it. After my family and my own parents, did THIS to me, I was pretty much done with them. I was pregnant and they could well afford to bail me out but wouldn't. I didn't speak to any of them for several months, and wasn't going to allow my parents to have contact with my child, but reconsidered for his benefit of having grandparents. It was a very, very, large thing for me to try to forgive what my family did to me then. I called my aunt Holly and Pablos house and their son, Andres, yelled at me saying no one was helping me and that Granny wouldn't do such a thing (when I tried to explain). They were already pissed at me for blaming them for not looking after Granny better, and for threatening to report Loren and Locklyn's kids for assault. My father used to call the Bairds, "the clan". They were extremely ingrown and clannish and if you weren't as religious and weird as they were, and just so happened to be Grannys favorite, you were a threat. I think they just worried Granny might try to give me a greater share of the inheritance or something, but that would never happen anyway, as my grandfather makes all the decisions about that, pretty much, unless Granny begs and cries or something.

So my family left me there to rot. My mother knew about her mother, and knew I was innocent, but didn't care. My father obviously didn't care either, worrying more about the bail money than me. And it is NOT like they were poor and couldn't afford it. They have just always been stingy and losing even a little bit of money, the risk, even though they knew they'd get it back, is more important to them.

So it was me, my baby, and God. I felt like Joseph with the coat of many colors, being thrown into the pit. Or, Job was a good one too. After two weeks, my lawyer argued I should be at home and free until trial because I was pregnant and it was a first time offense.

In the meantime, everyone had my mug shot, and now, the government had a nice set of fingerprints on file for me.

After I was let out, I got my own place, and the other thing that I couldn't manage to do, being jailed, was to file the claim for bankruptcy as Christa and the Abbey lawyers and Farmers knew I planned to do. There was a deadline, but because I was jailed, I was jailed just long enough for it to be practically impossible for me to file in time. Not to mention, the police told my grandparents to box up all my papers and leave them outside on the porch or put them in storage and make me pay to get into the storage. This was what police instructed my family to do.

So my legal papers were all over the place and when I was jailed that long, I lost time. They knew I had a deadline, they all knew. It benefitted a lot of people to have me jailed.

They didn't want to just let it go at that though. The state REALLY wanted me, bad. You would have thought I was a mass serial killer or something. The prosecuting attorney was Catholic. I will write down his name when I remember it. He was Italian Catholic and he told my PD they could only offer me a plea deal.

Next up, I'll write how I was threatened, with the removal of my baby, to accept a plea deal which would have tarnished my record forever. When they all knew I was innocent and I told them I had evidence to be obtained, to prove it.

Oh, the other thing I found odd, is that somewhere someone claimed to have mental eval notes on me, from jail. I didn't talk to anyone, at any time, except the guards, and then a chaplain, and I talked to the chaplain at my own request. I always thought it odd that there was any note made that a psychologist had visited me, because no one did. It wasn't the chaplain either, because I talked to people who knew him and said he really was a pastor.