Police Dispatch

A property manager’s punishment

A Property Manager's Punishment

San Xavier Beat March 4, 1:40 p.m.

The unpopularity of a trailer-park property manager was made quite clear (and understandable) after he was way too aggressive when collecting a debt from an elderly resident—and he was actually the person punished, even though he'd been the one to call law enforcement on the resident for allegedly wielding a gun, according to a Pima County Sheriff's Department report.

The property manager told sheriff's deputies that the resident had pointed a gun at him when he'd simply been trying to collect some late utility fees in the middle of the day. He also said the resident had hit him on the head.

But once deputies made him tell the whole story, he admitted that before the supposed gun incident, he'd actually been shaking the resident's trailer three or four times. (It was a very small trailer, what the reportee described as a "camper.") He also admitted he'd banged on the wall of the trailer, very hard, for a total of seven times—instead of simply knocking on the door to politely ask for the debt. His excuse for doing all this was that he thought the resident and his wife inside were asleep and he "wanted to wake them up."

When deputies interviewed the resident, they saw he was an older man who didn't appear violent at all, nor did he have any weapons—and he was blind (thus making it unlikely that he'd hit the property manager or aimed a gun at him—at least accurately). According to the man's elderly wife, he didn't even own a gun, though he had been fixing a BB gun for a neighbor, so perhaps that was what he'd been holding. In any case, one might think it reasonable to wield a weapon when opening the door to a person who'd been shaking one's trailer so hard that—according to the wife—books and other items had fallen from shelves. Also, the wife said, the property manager had been screaming curses outside their residence all the while he'd been hitting and shaking it.

When deputies interviewed another park resident, he likewise had nothing nice to say about the property manager, stating that since this man took over, "there had been nothing but problems." He even suspected the man of stealing some of the money he collected from residents before giving it to the trailer park's owner.

Thus instead of disciplining the blind man, deputies cited the property manager for disorderly conduct, considering he'd greatly disturbed the blind man and his wife and that none of his testimony about the resident acting violent was provable.