DIY Evictions in Nevada

Note: This post is a part of a series detailing my family's fight with dementia and elder abuse.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I do not even claim that anything in this story is accurate, legal or illegal. If you are attempting a DIY eviction, start with the legal self-help office. Most courts in larger systems have them. They can help you double-check your forms and make sure you're talking to the right people. If you have the means, consider hiring a company to do the eviction for you. The time spent waiting in line alone can be worth it, and any missteps are covered by the agreement.

If your grandfather has elected, in his dementia, to allow people of questionable character to live at his house, and, through a process of cajoling, begging, and pleading, they have refused to leave, it may be possible to avail yourself of the tortuous eviction process in your locale to unseat them from the house provided a) your grandfather agrees to sign the paperwork if you do not have Power of Attorney or b) you are able to obtain Power of Attorney and sign it yourself, but you would certainly be advised to avoid sparring with the legal eagle sovereign citizen types inhabiting the house and asking a third party professional to do it because they won't miss some minutia that cause months of delay, and, if you attempt the eviction on your own anyway, doing all the paperwork yourself, then it is possible to evict someone with the help of your local constable, nor should you be surprised, should your grandfather let them back onto the property in his dementia because he is being both stubborn and suggestable, to have to do the exact same process all over again (maybe twice if you screw up the paperwork in some small but easy to miss way again) to unseat them finally once you've been able to get him extricated from their influence and off the property.

By the summer of 2017, my brother and I had trespassed people from our family home only to have it reoccupied by those same strangers.  The triumph in 2015 was turned around only a few months afterwards as they were invited back in and established themselves even more firmly.  My grandfather provided various explanations (short-term charity, a favor to an old coworker, or a companion to help him from getting bored), but we could not influence him to send them away again.  None of it made sense to us, and we were left to wonder if he was sick, in debt, being blackmailed, involved in prostitution, a drug addict, etc.  His memory and recall were growing worse, but we didn't have any inkling of what dementia was nor who we should turn to.  Our arguments about his safety grew more frequent, and on occasion he was able to be reasoned with.  

The thing that shook him loose were discoveries that he had been the victim of check fraud multiple times, and he had finally become financially unstable.  Some names that appeared on fraud notices, forged checks not in his handwriting, and ETFs on his bank account for utilities at other addresses include Quasheen Laster, Zakeyaha Amacker, S Jones, Zanay Pruitt, Tangela Reliford, Zaysia Chess, and others.  We prevailed upon him to start eviction proceedings early in the summer of 2017.

Evictions are a touchy subject.  Tenants say Landlords use them to terrorize tenants with short notice and for facile reasons. Tenants fear the black mark on their credit or being tossed out into the summer heat, and the process evokes images of your belongings piled on the side of the road.  Stories about squatters in Vegas that abuse hearings and appeals, dragging their occupancy for months, circulate in media and parlor conversation.  But what do you do if your grandfather casually invites people to stay with him in his dementia?  What recourse do you have to make a suggestable man carry through with a month-long process that is a struggle at the best of times?  Who are these people that won't leave your family home anyway?  Can you trust the law to act, and how will these people respond to having a case brought against them?  This uncertainty weighed on us as we started researching the process.

We chose an eviction as opposed to another trespass because we wanted to be sure the people taking advantage of my grandfather could be removed from the property without recourse.  They were living at the house for months.  They had taken control of the upstairs, the closets, the kitchen, and every other surface of the house.  Any question that they had been living there for an extended period of time would be met with the law stonewalling us.  A trespass could become he said/she said, and there was no guarantee that officers could be prevailed upon to enforce it again.  Even though they were not ejected immediately, the eviction could be weilded by us should they return.

In Nevada, evictions are fairly straightforward.  A Summary eviction assumes no hearing will take place.  Tenants can object to this which will stretch the process out, but landlords that follow the process rigorously can do it without involving a lawyer in about a month.  The cost is around $300.00 after service fees, court fees, and getting a locksmith to change the locks on the residence.

File a First Notice:

• The most important part of the eviction is doing your homework and filing the right type.  In our case, our Summary Eviction used a Notice of Terminating a tenancy-at-will filed with and served by the Constables Office.  Though the people living there had no lease, we found many hand-written notes claiming to be paying rent or giving them permission to stay.  My grandfather had not seen nor signed any of these notes, but he could not remember if he had told them how long they could stay.  Instead of risking a court fight over a verbal contract, we decided to file as if there was an informal lease agreement as opposed to none.
• The contents of the notice were straightforward.  "Zakeyaha Amacker, et. al." allowed us to evict everyone in the house that was not related to my grandfather.
• Remember that you can have your work double-checked by legal self-help.  The office workers at the constables office were also willing to make sure we had the right paperwork and right time.
• You will be asked to pay a fee to serve the notice.  This was about $75 in Vegas when we did it.

Constable Posts the Notice:

• According to their workload, local moratoriums, and when you hit the office, the constables will go to the residence and attempt to serve the notice.  
• They could hand it to the peopleliving in the house directly.  They could hand it to another adult in the house.  If no one is available, they will post it on the door to the residence so anyone can see it.  The glue is sticky, and it will be difficult to remove from your residence without leaving a mark, but it is a necessary part of this process.
• Wait the prescribed time.  For our Notice of Termination of Tenancy-at-will, we needed to wait 5 business days after posting.  This process gives a tenant, legitimate or illegitimate, time to respond.  If you are trying to defend yourself from an eviction in Nevada, see the legal self-help center to find out your options.  A note that Constables calculate business days elapsed in the most conservative fashion possible.  Notices usually have a 5-business day period that must elapse between serving and moving to the next step.  So if you file on Monday and the Constable posts it on Tuesday, you would have to wait 5 business days thereafter to file the next step, the following Wednesday.  These extra days add up throughout the eviction process!  The Constables Office may be able to tell you when to return for the next step.
• Check on your notice by looking at the property to see if it was posted.  Your tenant may call you to ask questions they should know the answer to.  In our case, they tried to appeal to all the same things they used to guilt my grandfather into letting them stay, and we were beyond feeling at that point.  If you are desperate for news, call the Constables Office to confirm your notice was served successfully.

File a Notice of Unlawful Detainer:

• This Notice is fancy legal speak for, "I told you to leave, and you're still here."  If they have moved out after the first notice, no further harm nor foul need come to them.
• Similar to the Termination of Tenancy, this notice has to be served by a constable or authorized process server.
• Pay a fee similar to the last one.
• Wait a similar amount of time as the last one.  If you had gone down on the Wednesday as I mentioned above (9 days since the original filing), you would most likely have the second notice filed on Thursday, and the next step executable on the next Friday (18 days since outset).
• Check if they have filed an affidavit with the court to object to the Notice.  This must be filed by the end of the 5th day of the notice.  You should be able to check whether your tenant has filed such an affidavit on their records website.

File a Complaint with the Court

• Get all the paperwork you filed with the Constables Office.  This includes the badge number and date of service for each notice.
• Fill out the Complaint interview form.
• File with the clerk themselves at the court building, or e-file using the system available in your jurisdiction.  Personally, I went down because the clerk was able to catch small errors that would have had seen our case denied.  The clerk also double-checks that no one has opposed the order formally.
• Pay the fee associated with an Eviction Complaint.
• Monitor the progress of your case on the court's website.  Your case number can be used to see if a judge has approved or denied your complaint.  When e-filing, the system may assign you a temporary filing number that gets overridden when an actual case number is issued.  The case number should appear in email from the court.

Schedule the Eviction with the Constable

• Once your case is approved, return the constable and file instructions for the eviction itself.  Leave your contact details or the number of the person who will be preset at the actual eviction.
• Find a locksmith to change the locks or do it yourself.  If you are evicting people from a family residence, it will probably be a stressful day.  Take my advice, and engage a professional locksmith rather than relying on yourself to change the locks using Home Depot kits while deputies and irate tenants are watching.
• If you don't feel safe around your tenants, arrange someone else to be there with the deputies.  You might arrange a police escort separate from the constable if your local Authorities CAn Be bothered and are trustworthy.
• Be ready when the deputies call in the morning to schedule your eviction.  If you do not receive a call, be sure to reach out to the Constables Office to double check that they have the right number.  It pays to be over-cautious!
• Be ready for the deputy to be frank with you and the tenants.  They have done this countless times, and they have seen beligerence only witnessed by the most ardent bill collector.  Give them space, follow their instructions exactly, and don't try anything cute.  Be ready for the constable to eject unprepared tenants.  Celebrate after everyone is gone and the house has new locks.
• Stay informed of your responsibility after the eviction.  If the tenants did not vacate the property and take their things, you are probably required to keep them safe for a specified period.  There is probably pre-arranged procedure for your former guests to retrieve their things, and you should accomodate them while keeping yourself as safe as possible.
• Arrange for mail to be forwarded to your tenants at the new address.  Especially in cases of Elder Abuse, mail delivery can be used as a low-key excuse to maintain contact.  Cut off your former tenant from needing a reason to approach your property.

This first eviction was at times both furious and quiet.  Zakeyaha and the other people that took over the house began by yelling at my grandfather once the first Notice arrived.  He deflected by saying his hands were tied by his grandsons, and I believe their outsized reaction kept him lucid enough not to halt the process.  They then tried to bargain with him and us by claiming they were moving but needed more time.  This would have been an OK thing to say if they had not said similar things to my brother and I only to not move or even appear to prepare to move.  Finally, the day of the eviction saw incredible anger, but the most shocking part was that they had not prepared at all to be evicted.  Nothing was packed, and what was packed could fit in a suitcase which they dragged out the door waiting to be picked up.  We noticed missing mementos and jewelry as we were cleaning things, but there wasn't wanton destructions like you might see on a short-sale house from the Great Recession.  It ended with kind of a whimper as evicted kids and adults were picked up from the porch throughout the day until no one was left but family.

Above all, we took a moment to revel in the relief from the people we had just expelled.  As with computer security, physical access is 9/10ths of the hack.  Without these people in close proximity, we were able to show the true state of damage to the house.  Instead of rearranging the house and making it their own, they seemed to have lived on the things that were already there.  Bookshelves were piled with snacks, junk, new knick-knacks, and drinks instead of being cleared out to make way for their own stuff.  It felt like an episode of hoarders with layers of discarded clothes, papers and trash filling every corner.  It took 3 weeks of labor to get it clean and clear of their things.  The carpet was sticky.  Every decorative container was used as an ash tray, and there wasn't a room where I didn't find evidence of their passing.  But they were gone.  I stayed the night with my grandfather for the first time in two years.  I brought my son over to hang out.  And we rested for a bit knowing things could be different.

Considerations for a Loved One

In spite of our best efforts, the dementia wasn't going anywhere, and the people that were taking advantage of my grandfather only multiplied from then on out.  Slowly, he collected new guests.  One was an addict in recovery, Tameron Moreno, and her boyfriend on probation covered in tattoos, Chris Moreno.  She was arrested in a Target parking lot before we could evict them.  We were also not able to prevent him from regaining contact with the people that had been evicted.  And they sunk their hooks deeper into him.  Multiplying fraud while his mental health declined, we had to exert even more effort to free him and finally get him the help he needed. Here are some things we wish we would have done after the eviction:

• Move your loved-one to a new location if possible.  Let the property cool off as well if you are concerned for your safety while cleaning it out after they leave.  If your loved one is going into a home, be sure to tell the staff that their visitors should be limited to known individuals and screened for his abusers.  We had several instances of Zakeyaha and her mother attempting to take my grandfather from a home/rehab clinic when they learned we would not longer be putting up with their presence.
• Arrange for mail to be returned if not for your loved one still living at the address.  Mail is a casual no-pressure way to get a suggestable person to allow former abusers to regain access.  We wish we had enforced a greater embargo on these kind of casual contacts.  
• Judiciously block and report calls from Zakeyaha and others associated with the evicted families.  My grandfather is both unfailingly kind and suggestable.  A request for a ride to the store doesn't seem like such an imposition.  A daily ride to school for the kids that were also caught up in this situation was also a common tactic.  Until it turns into a sob story about having nowhere to live.  Most providers will allow you to block numbers from the dialer screen.  If your loved-one agrees to make you an authorized user, you might even be able to more effectively block numbers and monitor new ones.  We ended up blocking upwards of 20 different numbers over the five years of contact we had with these people.  Be diligent and it will pay dividends.
• Clearing out their stuff might seem like a no-brainer, but we could not get my grandfather to allow us to junk their stuff after the 30-day retention period had expired.  This opened a door to having them on the property to get some small thing from the pile of boxes that took up an entire half of a garage.  Do whatever you can to remove their things from the property into a storage unit or similar.  Junk anything new if you notice it.  The people we were faced with used a slow creep to come back into my grandfather's life.  Nip it in the bud by weeding regularly.
• Closer monitoring and a greater interest in his financial state could also have alerted us to his developing memory issues associated with dementia as well as abuse.  He slowly became unable to shop for himself.  He would handle cash poorly, and the bank took away his Visa Debit card due to fraud issues.  The people living in his house convinced him to add 4 lines to his cell bill including new phones and he was stuck with a $2000 bill when they skated.  Because he had been private and handled all of these accounts on his own before the eviction, we didn't find out about the escalating fincancial abuse until well after the second (also final) eviction.  Some focused effort could have seen one or more of us added to bank accounts and bills to help him monitor and pay these on time. And they could have helped us identify fraud much earlier.
• The eviction order issued by a judge is a powerful new reason to have someone trespassed.  Be forceful. Be stern.  And remind your loved-one how you are scared for them, how these people make them unsafe, and what you have done up to now.  The law will be increasingly on your side as you prevent anyone from taking root with your loved one.  And the reliance your relative with dementia may have on his old guests will be replaced with reliance again on you and yours.
• Allow me to emphasize again how utterly useless the Metro officers and detectives of Elder Abuse have been throughout this entire process.  Reports of fraud and theft were met with shrugs and sighs.  Offers to escort us during the eviction went nowhere.  After the second eviction, a CSI team took pictures, but nothing meaningful was done about the state of the house.  The people abusing my grandfather were picked up multiple times for various crimes, but nothing ever came out of the stolen time and money from my grandfather's life.  Don't look to them to save you or a loved one.

It may seem strange, given the hell we went through for five years, but we regularly think of how lucky we were.  Given my grandfather's choice of houseguest, they had access to do much more long-lasting damage to the house, to us when we tried to help our grandfather, and to my grandfather himself as he declined.  We did what he allowed us to as he started failing and flailing, but those short interventions helped us stay in touch for when he could no longer navigate.  And as hard as it was, he is now safe and those people are no longer bothering our family.  With fortuitous timing, an eviction for Zakeyaha and her hangers on was granted a second time just a few weeks before the COVID-19 eviction moratoriums in Nevada.  We were just in time to avoid another saga to get them out of the house, and we could turn our attention to taking care of our grandfather and preparing to move on from the house of horrors.

Pholos - Magos Biologis

This Tech-Priest Dominus from 2017 is the first 40K miniature I had done in over 5 years.  My last army were the Heirs of Vulcan, Mega Man-style Space Marines that I never got around to finishing before I sold the lot during spring cleaning.  The new Adeptus Mechanicus minis as well as the hype around 8th Edition finally got me to pull the trigger on more models.

The thing that really hooked me was the change in resources available to hobbyists during my hiatus.  The explosion of high production-quality painting tutorials on YouTube, lead by none other than Duncan Rhodes on Warhammer TV, is what really got me excited to paint.  I assembled miniatures for Blue Table Painting around 2005 which included conversions fed by their huge bitz wall.  But as much as I loved creating a new model, I didn't have the talent for my painting to keep up with my building.  This mini became the gateway to my current hobby enjoyment.  In addition to finding a Bob Rossian Joy of Painting, I have slowed down the rate of purchase, and I have also worked to level up my painting with each mini.  Check out other projects tagged Warhammer 40K for the latest.

The colors reflect the theme of the army.  Verdant green on ripped robes with gold sleeves.  This ragtag assemblage hates the weakness of flesh, and they despise the plants they're turning into war material for the Imperium.  The bottles of unguents keeping them alive are just as sickly green as their robes.

I pushed my skills in terms of layering.  At this point, I was doing no wet blending or even palette mixing.  Following painting tutorials, I applied a base, wash, base again on raised areas, and layers.  The techniques were basic, but seeing the miniature go from grey to painted was transformative.  I settled into a routine of finishing a single color through to highlights with this miniature.  Rather than base-coating everything (and reaching a featureless mini some people call "the ugly stage"), it felt good to practice basic techniques then iterate on the next color.  Before finishing the model, I went back over my novice areas and applied what I had learned.  This one miniature taught me so much about the process of painting.  If you also have a fear of painting, maybe try painting a squad leader before picking up a squad?

The base is a small circular medallion from a craft bin.  The cork and basing material help give it height in the display case without building a whole diorama.  The base is painted with drybrushing.  I finished it with stain after sanding away any stray brown base paint.  The bushes and grass from model railroad supplies.

First Coat

Almost Done

Around and Around

Learning AWS - Reflections after a Year in the Cloud

In 2018, a new job for me meant a new tech stack: AWS. Regardless of how long you’ve been developing software, new infrastructure can make you feel like you're starting from scratch. Jumping from a company with a cold room full of mainframes to somewhere cloud native was a shock, but I've enjoyed learning this wide world of cloud^h^h^h^h^hsomeone elses computer. If you feel like a cloud n00b, this post collects tips and tricks for learning cloud development from zero.

As with everything, pace yourself when trying to understand AWS and how to use it. If you feel blocked, put down one service and try another. I have found my happy path is a mixture of study, practical labs, poking around company infrastructure, and handling support rotations. Each contribute, in the long-run, to understanding the available services and building effective products upon them.

The Basics - AWS Vocabulary

The Cloud - Someone else’s computer. Keep this in mind when learning about AWS. It’s all just servers in a data center somewhere else. AWS may take care of a large or small portion of managing these computers for us, and they charge a large or small fee for the privilege.

Identity Access Management, IAM - Amazon’s method of controlling access and permissions to AWS resources. Users can have multiple IAM roles. EC2 Instances use IAM roles. Policies rely on IAM roles to allow/deny access so you only make resources available to those that need to access it.

Regions - A set of AWS data centers that are geographically related but operationally separate. Resources, accounts and VPCs can occupy a specific region.

Availability Zones - Each Region has at least three AZs. Each AZ is a data center separated from others within a specific Region. Each have independent power, cooling, and compute resources to enable you to add fault tolerance to your applications. If internet connections or power to one AZ goes down, you should be able to launch resources in the remaining AZs to compensate for the outage.

Fully Managed Service - AWS services that are fully-managed handle scaling, replication, fault-tolerance and latency without you needing to consider it. A big one is managed Elasticsearch clusters. All you need to do is specify a few parameters and AWS configures the rest (for the most part). Though you don't have to do nearly as much management, learning how to tune managed services is still up to you to solve.

EC2, Elastic Compute Cloud - Virtual machines you can launch on a whim, using the OS you desire, configuring them as you please. This is the backbone of AWS's successes. EC2 is the opposite of fully-managed services. AWS gives you the box, and you do the rest.

Learning Resources

AWS has a host of resources available to help you to learn what options are available. If you’ve never worked with a cloud provider before, I suggest taking some of their video training for Cloud Practitioner Essentials. Login with an Amazon (not AWS) account at https://www.aws.training/. Some trainings include labs that walk you through how to start your own instances, marshal AWS resources, and build a thing for yourself in the cloud. Pick something that matches your skill and engagement level, or use their workshop syllabus to self-guide training.

One of the best ways to learn cloud infrastructure is by doing. AWS offers a massive amount of services at a free-tier. Small VMs, hours of lambdas, and lots of S3 space can be used to learn a service without paying a dime to Amazon. YouTube tutorials about services often are built specifically to never breach free-tier levels of usage. Take advantage of this if getting your hands dirty helps you learn the best. Various online learning companies have video training and integrated quizzes/tests. Some have labs that rely on the free-tier of AWS so you can learn at basically no charge. If you're learning for work, talk to your manager about supporting a subscription if you have a specific avenue of study you want to go down:

• https://acloud.guru/

• https://www.pluralsight.com/

• https://www.udemy.com/

• https://www.youtube.com/ + Search for any AWS Service

If you’re a book person, AWS sponsors official study guides for each certification they offer. These can go out of date fairly quickly, but even an old version will help you get your feet wet when using a prominent service (DNS is DNS, and a Route 53 study guide will be largely applicable next year as last). Check the public library for a guides that will be applicable even if they aren't current. Find a slack channel at work or speak with experienced engineers. Context from experience can break a logjam of misunderstanding faster than reading the AWS docs for the fifth time.

Certifications

The AWS certifications are not required to work with cloud resources, but they can be a big boost to your confidence. If certifications and tests are your preferred method of study, here are a few lines that have been recommended:

• AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials - Good overview of AWS resources, administration, security, and budgeting. Take this if you’ve never used cloud resources before and want to come up to speed fast. Available as a series of videos with a free online test for certification.

• AWS Solutions Architect - This is another broad level of study that can be useful after studying Practitioner. It offers a good overview of current offerings at AWS. You might use some, others not so much. Sometimes it feels like a sales pitch for their managed services, but the curriculum is useful for determining what is possible during the initial phases of a project. The multi-tiered certifications offer a learning path that can scale to your experience and career trajectory.

• AWS Certified Developer - A deep dive on developing with AWS, the Developer cert study can be helpful in learning how to build on AWS as a developer. The practical labs and study areas cover some of the same problems you might have to solve every day in taking an idea from concept to supportable, sellable, product. This set of certs is also multi-tiered, and it can scale with your own experience if you feel like you need a fresh challenge.

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Another deep-dive learning path that can help understand how to configure, secure, and economize cloud resources. Covers management and tooling available to keep a cloud running smoothly and safely without breaking the bank. Also has multiple tiers of certification.

Yarn Pet Mod - Platform for One Pound Cakes

My roomate has been picking up knitting and expanding their crochet skills during the pandemic Stay at Home orders.  As a part of their stimulus, they bought a Yarn Pet from Nancy's Knit Knacks.  They have also acquired a yarn ball winder that claimed to be able to do one pound skeins.  The curlicue tensions the yarn as it unwinds from the outside of the cake.  The platforms that came with it were thin circle platforms afixed to a smooth metal spindle with stops and set screws (you can see the spindle and stops above).  The platform holds the cake above the base at the appropriate height for the curlicue.  Small cakes?  Set it high.  Big cake?  How low can you go!

When they actually tried to use the Yarn Pet with the largest cakes (Caron One Pound FTW!), the little platform circles that came with the pet allowed the cake to slump and sag.  The cake would also rub against the curlicue and made it hard to pull.  They were worried about the yarn slipping below the edge and tangling under the cake.

To fix this, I used a board as wide as I could get and made it a circle:

1. Found a home depot pine board in my scrap bin that was 5 3/4" wide.  Solid wood is preferable to plywood which can get splintery and snag the yarn.  Avoid knots if at all possible.
2. Cut length to match width.
3. Find the center by marking two lines from corner to corner
4. From center, use a protractor to mark 22.5 degree increments to the edge.
5. Drill a hole in the center mark.  To fit the Yarn Pet spindle, I needed a bit with a width  7/32".
6. Using a table saw with miter gauge set to 45 degrees or a miter box, cut your square into an octagon
7. Test your new platform on the spindle.  My square was about a quarter inch too wide at the widest point, but it had plenty of play between a flat side and the curlicue.  I knew trimming it again would allow it to spin freely.
8. I trimmed my octagon into a hexadecagon by setting my gauge to 22.5 degrees.  (Towards the end of the piece, the side touching your miter gauge will be incredibly small.  Keep a firm grip, and beware of kickback!)
9. Sand the tarnation out of every surface with 150 up to 220 grit.  You can see in the picture above that I rounded every edge and corner.  I chose not to finish the wood, but I can always go back and do this between knitting projects.

Things learned:

• I thought the thickness of the platform might be an issue, but it turned out to be perfect for giant cakes. The added thickness prevents the platform from wiggling on the spindle.  You can plane down your board to match the included platform circles, but then I might be worried about their integrity.  As is, the yarn comes off cleanly with the center-line of the cake coming just above the curlicue.  So smooth...
• When putting the largest cakes on the pet, use the rubber stoppers for spindle-wound skeins to keep the cake centered on the spindle.  This will prevent wobbling due to a loosening center as it is pulled from side to side.
• If you have a circle of the appropriate width and thickness already, all you need to do is find the center and drill it.  Couldn't be simpler.

Surviving Dementia - Signs of Trouble

Note: This post is a part of a series detailing my family's fight with dementia and elder abuse.

It took a long time for my family to recognize the changes that were happening to my grandfather because of dementia.  The loss of routine with my grandmother's death caused him to start making questionable decisions.  As we atempted to protect him, we misinterpreted why he was acting the way he was.  This lead to further alienation as his symptoms grew more pronounced.  It is my hope that by sharing these initial stages as we experienced them, we can help others in a similar situation.

My grandparents were always helping someone.  When my father divorced, their house was a place of stability.  As I grew up, I heard of cousins, friends and others that relied on that refuge for themselves.  I never heard of remuneration, there was never a question of space or logistics.  They would open a space for those that needed it.  A cousin we called Aunt treated them like second parents.  Their home was open to my father's friends in his youth, and friends of my brother and me during ours.  When home life was rough, we lived there full-time, and they would cart us all over the US for summer vacation.  When my grandmother died, my bother and I were gone with families of our own.  From our perspective, he lost something he'd always had: a person that needed his help.

 

For the few months, life seemed to be returning to normal.  I stayed at the house a few nights a week to help keep him company, and other family stepped in to pack up my grandmother's things.  The past few years had left him increasingly isolated.  My grandmother slowed to where she mostly watched TV, and my grandfather noticed this. He would repeat to us his concern about our grandmother with every visit.  Sometimes more than once in the same visit.   We filed it away as odd but not beyond his typical behavior.  A bout with shingles caused my grandfather to stop attending church in about 2010.  His own friend group had aged with him as well.  His closest friend, a gardening columnist in the Las Vegas area, passed in 2014 as well.  He had few visitors outside family.  My brother and I were strategizing on what the future looked like.  Would one of us move in and help out?  What would my grandfather want?  In the middle of this period, we started running up against a wall as his compensations started to crumble.

As I was working full time, my grandfather was helping my family (let alone another) with rides to and from school, doctors, and other family appointments.  We began to notice that he was less punctual than usual.  His driving was less careful. And we would sometimes call him for a pick-up and wait more than an hour while he was unreachable on his phone.  We'd finally reach him to find that he was off on the opposite end of town having completely forgotten about the request.  Eventually, our family was no longer comfortable relying on him, or trusting him behind the wheel.

As a former handyman, my grandfather was the first person I thought of when my father's wooden gate broke.  We loaded it into the back of a truck and set off to see him.  When we got there, we worked mostly in the garage, and I noticed my grandfather was wary of letting us go inside.  Finally, I went in and met a mother and her child.  This was the first time I met Zakeyaha Amacker.  I had never seen these people before in my life, but my grandfather claimed he knew the mom through her mother from way back, and that he was giving the children a ride to school.  I tried to pry, but he shut me down.  They claimed to be Katrina refugees and that they lived close by. I made it a point to increase my presence.  He was being nice and had found a way to help someone in the absence of my grandmother.  They seemed like friendly and temporary personalities in my grandfather's life.  I could not be more wrong.

Starting about 5 months after my grandmother's death, the situation at the house became untenable.  The people I met had moved in.  The house was a mess with dishes, spoiled food, and trash everywhere.  In the preceding months, the only thing I could find on Zakeyaha was an article from the Las Vegas Sun about a double shooting at the Excalibur in 2012, and the only local women that I know of who hang out at the Excalibur in the middle of the day are sex workers.  We were afraid for my grandfather's safety, jewelry was missing, and my grandfather, despite assurances, could not tell us what these people were doing here or when they would be gone.

One night in April 2015, I came to find the house vacant.  I searched it looking for signs as to who these people were.  I found instead stolen credit cards and IDs, cigarette and pot remnants that had clearly been smoked inside the house, and Zakeyaha's things spread throughout my grandfather's bedroom.  I did not have time to address these things that night.  No one was home, I was alone, and I clearly was in over my head.  I took extensive pictures and resolved to talk to my grandfather directly about my concerns.

The whole month of May, I pressed my grandfather on the phone for an explanation to what I had seen.  He denied that he knew about any of it, and he swore they would be gone within the week.  But the weeks dragged on.  I would explain the evidence again, and he would reassure me again.  One night, I found the house to be vacant when I had scheduled a visit with him.  In a fit, I locked every door and called my brother to come over too.  While we were waiting for them to arrive, someone rolled up looking for 'Z' and claiming to sell weed (still illegal in Vegas at the time).  A Call to the cops was Answered with amBivalence.  In the interim, my grandfather eventually arrived home with Zakeyaha in tow, I refused to let her inside without talking to my grandfather, first, alone.  I explained the shady behavior to his face.  Finally, I got my grandfather to agree to have her trespassed.  The cops finally showed up and took away the person selling weed, but wantesd to stay out of the domestic dispute.  Regardless, they did not force us to allow them back into the house.  We bagged up her things and took her to a family member's apartment a few blocks away.  Whew.  What a relief.  That was over.

All of this was absolutely bonkers to me.  I grew up Mormon.  My grandfather took me to church.  Old people were supposed to obsess over their grandkids, not look for an entirely new family.  I had hoped to move into his house with my family and be there as he aged.  Instead, I'm trying to stop strangers from living there.  I felt betrayed.  Maybe she was a prostitute.  Maybe he'd been a patron while my grandmother was still alive.  I didn't know what to think.  Most importantly, I didn't have the tools to even recognize what kind of cognitive impairment that was starting to take hold.

With dementia, it is not uncommon for families to notice a steep decline after major life changes.  Things that seemed fine as they were happening (story repetition, arriving late, and keeping new company, or uncharacteristic anger issues) are signals of damage in their brain, and that damage adds up over time.  Know that none of this is because your loved one no longer loves you or just doesn't care.  As hard as it may be, try to not take their words personally as you help steer them toward help and safety.  In truth, a person suffering from dementia can no longer understand why their anger is misplaced.  The brain is a wonderful and plastic thing, but eventually these cognitive changes and reach a breaking point.  Often, the compensations rely on family and friends that are alienated by the new behavior.  Social deficits creep in but aren't noticed until the spouse passes.  Money trouble manifests only after reserves run dry. Anger spills over when they are overwhelmed with social stimuli they can no longer process. These are all symptoms of dementia, and each affected person walks a different path through them.

Dementia is not a normal part of aging, it is instead a distinct decline separate from the most common changes as we get older.  Even if your family has no history of dementia, it is my recommendation that you get comfortable with the signs as soon as possible.  Begin to take note of behavioral changes as you come across them.  If you are your relative's Medical Power of Attorney, you can speak with their physicians directly.  Your relative may consent to having you tag along at the doctor where you can voice your concerns and begin working on evaluations that will allow you to bring maximum treatment options to bear.

Beyond the signs and symptoms of cognitive impairment like memory and social deficits, dementia can also change the personality and manners of those it affects.  It is common to have a person with dementia alternate between compliance and anger when confronted with difficult topics.  The changes to their brain prevent them from processing social cues or events, and they will sometimes revert to fight or flight behavior as a compensation.  It was this compliance that was used by Z to put off any talk of their departure, and it was this same compliance that allowed us to have Z trespassed.  As my grandfather was more and more affected by dementia, he was angry over perceived slights and chafed at our attempts at seeking help.  This was the hardest for us to deal with, and both my brother and I spent many a night yelling, confronting, and crying over someone we had never seen get actually irate.  Try not to take it personally as it is not them that is doing this to you.  It is the disease.

Through all of this, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was singularly unhelpful.  They will do the bare minimum for you even if there are obvious signs of abuse.  They took the guy with weed away before they considered handling the abuse in the house.  And their referral to Elder Abuse detectives lead to years of disappointment.  They may even prioritize looking at you and what you are trying to do as exploitative and unlawful because they do not know the first thing about dementia or responding to elder abuse. It looks like just one more domestic squabble.  Cops are not your friends.  Avoid calling them if at all possible. Handle things through family attorneys before syptoms appear instead.

Though we won this battle, we did not have a inkling of my grandfather's true condition.  The symptoms were right in front of us if we had been educated enough to see them.  It started with small behaviors that we were reluctant to call him on.  Eventually, we could not rely on him for previously rock-solid tasks.  And this chapter climaxed in discovering how others had begun to manipulate him.  It would still be 5 years until we extricated him from their grasp.