EB is about 22 years old and lived with his sister and her two young kids above the shop.
His sister is a single mom.. working crazy hours at a bullshit job to provide for her kids. She had EB move in with her after he got out of jail because 1) their mother didn’t want him back in the house and 2) it would be free babysitting for her so she wouldn’t have to kill herself too much to make the rent, bills, etc.
Chief and I felt bad for their situation and we would help them out when they needed it. More so for her and the kids but EB wound up reaping benefits from it too.
Since EB basically did nothing all day but get high, he became friendly with Weed. Are you really surprised by that one?
One day… a little before we were robbed … EB came in and ordered all this stuff. He had Food Stamp numbers written on a piece of paper which Chief ran for payment.
Nothing unusual there. Most times the sister would forget to leave the card at home and EB would just have Chief key the numbers into the gizmo.
Like I said, we help them out when we could.
The Thursday after the house was robbed, Chief gets a phone call from a woman that lives in the neighborhood but who he doens’t know and had never personally come into the shop.
She tells him that her food stamp information had been stolen and when the state ran a list of purchases, the shops name came up. When Chief heard the amount, he knew right away who had taken the card. The woman was the first one to mention EB’s name. Apparently, he hung around her daughter or granddaughter or someone who lives in her house.
Of more interest was the fact that she said the word on her block was that EB and his cousin had robbed our house and sold our PS3 in the city.
If Chief could have grown hair he would have. I don’t know what color he turned but he was almost like a cartoon character.
He hung up from her and banged on EB’s door. When he answered, Chief right away asked him what the inside of our house looked like. It was EBs turn to change colors and he became as white as the shirt I’m wearing.
He bobbed and weaved around everything. Swore he had nothing to do with anything and when Chief challanged him with the information he had received, EB told him that he could check his apartment if he wanted to.
Chief’s response was that he knew there was nothing up there and that eventually he was going to find out who robbed our stuff and when he did, he was going to break their knees.
He also told EB that if he didn’t think Chief could do it then they could roll right then.
I knew EB was shaken up and I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he went back upstairs!
Fast forward to the next day. I walked into the shop after work to find EBs sister in deep conversation with Chief.
Turns out that EB had swiped her ATM card and withdrew all the cash she had in there… the rent money, the utility money, etc. She reported it to the bank, the bank had him on ATM-Cam, they were pressing charges and she intended to press charges. Chief told her that he would do something with the door to prevent him from coming back in the house and a little while after that, their mother :: who’s also a customer :: came in visibly upset.
She told me that she turned a cold heart to him. It’s obvious that he was into much more harder stuff then anyone originally assumed so I told her that it wasn’t her son doing this… it was the junkie he became.
I don’t know how much grief he’d given her over the course of his life but I do know what it’s like to be around a junkie and my heard did break for her.
Fast foward another week and their older brother came into the shop to tell Chief that his neighbors had told him that EB was in his neighborhood trying to unload a laptop.
There was no question now who robbed our house.
On Christmas Day, EB was picked up at a crack house and is currently being held on a 500,000.00 bond.
We won’t get our stuff back. I can guarentee that it’s long gone. But EB lost alot more… his family and their trust