Like a thief in the night: A true story of betrayal and patio furniture
For as long as there have been portable breast pumps, resourceful moms have employed them in surprising places: under a desk, in a parked car, on an airplane, in the principal’s office …
Judith Miller drew the line at the men’s restroom at the Daley Center. Summoned for jury duty last October, she consulted the Cook County website to make sure she’d be able to express milk for her 11-week-old son. Yes, it assured her, there is a lactation room for jurors.
But that was news to the clerk in the jury assembly room. When Miller arrived, eager to serve, she was told the only option with a locking door and a working electrical outlet was the men’s room. All together now: Ewwwwwwwwwwww. Miller said no thanks and was dismissed. She went home disappointed, and wrote an op-ed for the Tribune, calling for legislation that would require lactation rooms in county buildings throughout Illinois. That bill, sponsored by Sen. Elgie Sims, DChicago, passed the Senate unanimously in April and awaits action in the House.
Miller, an attorney and law professor, has also filed a discrimination complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights.
It’s frustrating to think any of that is necessary in 2018. Breast pumps are not a new thing. Nor is the notion that nursing mothers should be encouraged and accommodated as they work, travel, go to school or otherwise participate in public life.
Equally frustrating is the fact that Cook County’s considerable efforts at accommodation have failed for lack of follow-through. All of the county’s courthouses have a lactation room for jurors and another for nursing mothers who have other business in the building. Who knew?
Not the clerk who offered Miller a spot in the men’s john. And just when we were ready to chalk that incident up to an isolated misunderstanding — because ewwww — we heard from another juror who described a nearly identical experience at the Daley Center five years earlier.
Kiana Keys reached out after reading Miller’s op-ed in the Tribune. “I know exactly which bathroom they took her to,” Keys told us.
Keys reported for jury duty in July 2012 and shared details with her online moms group throughout the day. She was apprehensive at first, but settled in with a book after a clerk in the assembly room assured her there was a place she could pump. When the time came, though, she was shown to the men’s room.
Taken aback, she locked herself in and gamely began to sanitize and set up. But she quickly became disgusted. She returned to the desk to request another room and was told there wasn’t one. Surely, Keys insisted, she couldn’t be the first to object to this arrangement. An argument ensued, and the clerk finally handed Keys a check for her service and told her she was dismissed.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois has logged complaints from other nursing mothers at other courthouses, too.
Keys didn’t know it, but she could have been excused without showing up. Since 2006, state law has allowed nursing moms to opt out of jury duty. Cook County recently updated its website to make that clear, along with posting detailed information about the availability of lactation rooms in city and suburban courthouses. The County Board recently pledged to survey and update its buildings with an eye to accommodating nursing mothers.
None of that will matter if public-facing employees don’t know where the rooms are and how to access them. Which is why state lawmakers are poised to pass a bill that would require all counties to provide suitable lactation spaces in courthouses — and to train their employees not to direct nursing moms to a men’s bathroom instead.
We shouldn’t need a law to force governments to accommodate nursing mothers in public buildings. But apparently we do.
Last Tuesday, even as suspicions were raised that special interests opposed to Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens may have funded the revelations about his sex life, came news that Greitens himself has been living large on special interest money. Missourians should be disgusted by all of this.
Greitens’ personal financial disclosure form, filed Monday, reveals that private donors paid nearly $100,000 to fly the governor around the country in 2017. In addition, Greitens formed a limited liability corporation to cloak his purchase in early 2017 of a $750,000 home at the Innsbrook resort in Warren County.
J&J Escape LLC obtained a $675,000 loan for Greitens’ six-bedroom property from Carrollton Bank. Mark Bobak, a former top lawyer for Anheuser-Busch and a Greitens buddy, is a director of the bank’s parent company. Ownership by an LLC provides privacy and protection against lawsuits seeking personal assets. It also would allow investors to buy into the company.
In one of his first acts as governor, Greitens signed an executive order claiming in part that “this administration will lead by example in order to fundamentally change the culture in Jefferson City.” It certainly changed — for the worse.
Greitens stopped answering questions from the press and rarely talked with lawmakers. After railing against the state’s “culture of corruption,” Greitens began to rely heavily on secret donations to a “dark money” committee to fund his political operations, which included attacks on Republican lawmakers.
He also relied on private donors to fund his extensive travels, claiming that he was doing the taxpayers a favor by not using the state’s aircraft. Stan Herzog, who owns a major contracting company in St. Joseph, spent $60,000 for four out-of-state trips by the governor and an undisclosed amount for in-state travel.
Herzog gave $650,000 to Greitens’ campaign and owns the building where his dark money committee is headquartered. FAA records show his company owns three private planes, including a Gulfstream 100 business jet.
Other travel was paid for by a St. Louis investment firm, Drury Hotels of St. Louis and the chairman of Integra Connect of Florida, a health care technology company with which the state did $73,000 worth of business last year.
Yes, it looks bad that Scott Faughn, a Jefferson City newspaper publisher with close ties to tax-credit millionaires angry with Greitens’ attack on their business, dropped off $50,000 with the attorney representing the whistle-blowing ex-husband of the woman with whom Greitens was involved in 2015. Another $50,000 was dropped off by a mystery courier, all of this before the allegations against Greitens blew up in January.
It’s also too bad we don’t know who’s paying Greitens’ all-star defense team, either. What’s worse is that Missouri government has become a private club whose beneficiaries most certainly don’t include Missouri taxpayers.
OK. I got a story for y’all. This happened this past weekend in a nice little subdivision in Floyd County.
So, on Friday afternoon my buddy comes outside and realizes his very nice patio furniture is missing from his front porch.
He posts on his neighborhood Facebook page, warning others that his stuff had been stolen and for them to look out for their own belongings. He includes a photo of his patio furniture. Then he calls the police and makes a report over the phone. He goes to dinner and by the time he got back home, a neighbor’s wife realizes her plant is missing from outside THEIR house. But this neighbor has a surveillance camera and posts photo stills from the video of a lady walking up to their house, picking up the plant and walking away with it.
Well when my buddy reads that, he suddenly realizes that it’s not just his expensive patio furniture that’s missing. It’s lots of little things. Little decorations from the front porch including a little fairy garden his daughter owned.
Suddenly other neighbors start calling my friend and the video guy saying they know exactly who the thief is. It’s a woman that lives or stays right there in that neighborhood. The police are called back to give them the video and the new information. The police come to the neighborhood, knock on the door of the alleged perpetrator but no one answers the door.
During all this, a Sheriff’s deputy who lives right across the street from that lady, checks HIS surveillance video and it shows that same lady coming home and unloading many items into her garage INCLUDING that one plant that was on the video.
So the police can’t do anything because no one will come to the door and they don’t have a warrant. So they tell the neighborhood folks to give them a call if they see her come home.
By about 10:30 p.m. on Friday night, several of the neighbors see the car from the video pull back into the neighborhood and park. They call the police who then return BUT the people still won’t come to the door. While the police were there, blinds were closed and lights were turned out but no one came to the door.
And the police still can’t do anything because they don’t have a warrant.
All this while, the neighborhood folks realize that the guilty party has been reading the events unfolding on Facebook because they’re members of the neighborhood Facebook page.
My buddy then parks his car at the entrance of his driveway and just sits there so that IF the thief tries to leave the neighborhood, she can’t without him seeing her leave. I called him while he was out there and he was just sittin’ there with snacks in case he had to be there for a while.
At this point, my buddy gets on the Facebook group and demands his property back because he knows the thief can see it. That seems to have made some sort of an impact because at about 11:30 p.m. he gets a message from the thief who admits to stealing the stuff and claims to have been drunk but she’ll bring all his stuff back because she doesn’t want to go to jail.
He sits there on his property waiting. Over the next hour and a half, neighbors who have been reading the post start coming out and waiting WITH him. It’s about 1 a.m. now but they’re all standing out there on his property.
At one point she opens her garage door and starts putting my friend’s property out on the street in front of that house. But he yells down the street “No, you gotta bring that stuff back where you found it.”
She brings back all his stuff INCLUDING stuff she didn’t even take from him. Apparently she can’t keep up with what she got from where. She even brings over some half empty bottles of bourbon. She’s rifling through the car which was full of wind chimes and pillows and other outdoor decor.
She apologizes profusely and then starts spilling all the details. She tells him that she has lied to her boyfriend about where she’s been getting all this stuff.
By the way, some of the stuff she gave my friend “back” was her boyfriend’s parents’ stuff that the mother then has to come get. It was a mess. Anyhow, the entire time my friend says the thief was very apologetic UNTIL he gets all his stuff back then she picks out a neighbor watching, cusses him out, jumps back in her car and peels out of the neighborhood never to be seen again.
At this point, they haven’t seen hide nor hair of her. At some point the boyfriend (who’s the one living in the neighborhood and she just stays with him) he goes to every house in the neighborhood apologizing to each and every person there. He makes a Facebook post assuring everyone that he’s no longer with the thief and he posts photos of the items in his garage so people can come over and retrieve their stolen items.
As it turns out, my buddy’s surveillance post to Facebook has gone semi-viral and people from all over the county are coming out of the woodwork saying they believe they’ve also been victims of this particular thief.
All that is to say that y’all need to be vigilant and don’t take it for granted that your stuff is safe, even on your own property. SEVERO AVILA Jim Powell of Young Harris