Lonnie answered the door in his bathrobe. He tried to smile.
“There’s been a misunderstanding. The kid’s upset. College kids, you know.”
The caseworker walked past him into the laundry room. She saw the air mattress. The folded wheelchair. My mother’s swollen ankles.
Then she counted the pills in my mother’s prescription bottles.
Her pain medication was supposed to last thirty days. The bottle had been filled nine days earlier.
It was empty.
The deputies found the rest of the pills in Colt’s jacket. In my mother’s bedroom. Along with a list of names and phone numbers. He’d been selling them.
Colt was arrested that morning for theft of prescription medication and possession with intent to sell.
Lonnie was arrested that afternoon. Neglect of a vulnerable adult, financial exploitation, and attempted fraud.
The “lawyer” he’d taken my mother to wasn’t a lawyer. He was a notary who ran a tax prep business out of a strip mall. He was charged too.
