Ahh, but recounting what happened is never exact, now, is it. Everyone knows this. At this very moment, in courtrooms around the country, juries and judges are listening for The Truth in the stories told by witnesses, family members, the police, etc.
God bless them.
My account re the night of March 31, 2005 will be just as sloppy, subjective, and just plain wrong in spots as the sworn testimony those juries and judges are listening to:
In February of 2005, having recently been honorably discharged from the army (he’d served in Afghanistan), Nesto Monell came home to discover that, after pipes had burst, his family had moved from their Taunton, MA home. Indeed, the seriously-damaged house was for sale. A self-starter and “between jobs,” so to speak, the twenty-five year old decided to renovate the house himself.
After some false starts and not much progress, Nesto’s ” friend,” who’d been letting Nesto sleep on his couch, suggested the “help” of 2 well-connected guys (WCGs) who owned a lot of property in the Taunton area so had connections with construction workers.[Quotation marks certainly help my take on this story, don’t they!]
On the evening of March 31, Nesto had been drinking beer and playing pool when he received a phone call from one of the WCGs, asking him if he planned to come by the house. Nesto said no. Later that night, driving past his house, he sees all the lights on and cars in the driveway.
What the hell?
So he goes into his house and tries to talk to one of the WCGs but he’s on his cell. Frustrated, Nesto calls his girlfriend but, as he’s talking to her, suddenly two men (three men? I was never sure) in hoodies burst into the room with guns and handcuffs. Nesto keeps his cell phone on, his girlfriend hears everything, she calls the police. Nesto is handcuffed, forced to the floor, but decides that “if I’m going to be killed, I don’t want to be on the floor,” and, in fact, manages to escape. Still handcuffed, he runs through the neighborhood until, some time later, circles back to see his house surrounded by police cars. Handcuffed, “a black man,” as one policeman described him, Nesto walks up to a policeman, asks what’s happening, says “That’s my house,” and is promptly arrested. You see, when the police responded to the home invasion call from Nesto’s girlfriend, they’d found 5 kilos of coke and several guns, including an AK 47.
Yikes.