But soon things started getting strange. I noticed they had lots of visitors.

"Well, of course, they're so friendly!" I told myself, in my best Barney Fife voice.

But the visitors all drove nice cars, like Escalades and Mercedes.

"How wonderful; their friends are so successful!" I bumbled.

My girlfriend and I also noticed police cars driving by our house several times a day, but since we had only just moved upstairs from the basement, which had no windows, we assumed that the police traffic was normal. Maybe our street was a standard route for the police to get to and from their station, or maybe they were patrolling the elementary school two blocks down the street from us. After all, you can never trust a second-grader.

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But everything changed one morning when I woke up to go to work. When I got to the stop sign at the end of the block, two police cars were driving toward me, and when I passed them, they immediately did a U-turn, threw on their lights, and pulled me over. I admit I kind of rolled that stop sign, but two cars to pull me over seemed excessive. An officer approached my car and politely asked me if I knew why I was pulled over. But as I started to offer some bullshit excuse for rolling the stop sign, another cop came running up behind the first officer with his gun drawn, screaming at me to get out of the car.

There were a few reasons for this: First, there's that whole "legally only one rental" thing. Thus, the police had no idea that there were two separate apartments in the house. Second, the basement apartment was furnished, while the upper unit was not. We had only been living upstairs for three weeks or so, had been too cheap to buy much furniture. Other than a bed, a few chairs, and a dining room table, we didn't have much. Turns out there's another kind of person who doesn't have much: drug dealers.

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Since the cops had been watching the house for a few weeks, and since the police could only see into the mostly empty upper unit where my girlfriend and I lived, they assumed we were in on it. When I tried to explain to the detective that there were two units in the house and the people they were looking for only lived in the lower unit, the detective responded by saying: "Well, we have a warrant for the whole house."

And by god, they were gonna use it.

Inside was my sleeping girlfriend, as well as our pit bull. Our dog happens to be friendlier than a thousand Mr. Peanutbutters, but historically, cops and pit bulls don't get along, and I was afraid she would end up shot. I had begged the police to let me come in with them so my dog wouldn't be scared, but of course, they didn't allow that.

I wasn't able to see the next part from the police car, but my girlfriend said that the police stormed in screaming at her to get on the floor, to take care of the dog, and other orders that couldn't possibly be followed simultaneously. An officer later told us this was intentional, to create a sense of confusion, because "we have a plan, and we don't want you to come up with a plan." My girlfriend shoved our dog back into the bedroom and then was forced to lie naked on the floor (did I mention she had been sleeping naked?) while the police cleared the rest of the apartment.

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After the cops decided there were no crazy people hiding anywhere, they found some clothes for my girlfriend to put on, then sat her down. One officer watched over her, while others started tearing apart our house. It was like that scene in Fame but in reverse, and somehow more traumatizing.

One police officer stood watch over us, making the most inappropriate small talk this side of anything-at-a-urinal:

"Oh, that's a nice guitar you have, I play too."

*They destroy the guitar, looking for drugs*

"I see you have a sewing machine, how handy."

*They destroy the sewing machine, looking for drugs*

But if we asked this cop anything about what was going on -- what they were looking for, what happens next, just ... what, please, what? -- she immediately shut down.

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My kitchen became the police force's mobile office. They brought tons of stuff upstairs from the basement, and spread it all out on the kitchen table. The only things I could see were a couple of guns and large Rubbermaid bins -- the kind people store Halloween decorations or old junk in -- filled with who knows what.

The girl who lived downstairs -- we'll call her Drugette McDealerson -- apologized to us about a dozen times. She told us that this was actually the third time that she was in a house raid, "but it was never my fault -- I just have really bad luck." My girlfriend said exactly what you're thinking: "Maybe you need to start thinking about who you're hanging out with if this is the third time you've been raided."

The officer guarding us kept up the chatter -- she told us how she started as a uniformed cop, then worked prostitution for a while, then got into drug enforcement -- all while my girlfriend and I made plans to move straight the hell out of this place. We did end up doing that, by the way, about five days after the police raid.

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The three of us had been sitting there for two or three hours before Druggie finally came home -- turned out he had been at the nearby casino all night -- and was immediately cuffed and brought to sit with us. The police started bringing us each back, one by one, into one of the bedrooms in my apartment. That was their mobile interrogation room.

The detectives asked me how much cash I had in the house, right now. I worked part time on the weekends as a bartender, so I tended to have a few hundred dollars from those shifts in the house. When I told them this, they said "So that $40,000 we found hidden downstairs isn't yours." Shocked to find I was within a five-mile radius of that much money, my only response was to laugh.

Pro-tip: Police don't like that.

One detective asked why I was laughing, and I said that it was just ridiculous that I would have that much money, and that it definitely wasn't mine. Then they said that I sounded like I was lying, and I spent the next several minutes convincing them I had no idea that there was that much cash in my house. Trust me, if I had 40 grand in cash, I wouldn't be renting a duplex. With no furniture.

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They then asked me how often I went in the shared laundry room. I said every couple days to do laundry (duh). They asked if I had ever seen anything strange in the laundry room (no). They then asked me how it was possible that I could go in the laundry room every couple days and not notice my downstairs neighbor's "rig" sitting in the utility sink. When I asked what they meant by "rig" they said, "You know, his set-up, all his equipment." I asked them what that was, as I had never seen anything in the utility sink other than a drain plug. The detectives kept pushing me to say I saw something in that sink, but they would not clarify what exactly I was supposed to have seen. I believe that they were lying about the "rig" in order to see if I would admit to knowing more about my neighbor's operation than I did (which was nothing), because I still have no idea what they meant. I suppose a fancy bong or something? A drug blender? Is that what they do -- blend them?

The detectives closed their interview with an ominous ultimatum: If I didn't want to be charged with something, I had better tell the police everything I knew about any possible drug dealers. Since I didn't have any information like that to give, I was reasonably frightened.

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One of the first things we did was call our landlord. Even though the police had found us innocent, our landlord was pissed, and insisted that we were to blame for her house being torn apart and one of her tenants getting arrested. Because of our ... machinations? I never did follow the logic. We decided that we were moving out immediately, so she threatened to charge us with an eviction if we didn't pay her two months' rent for the privilege. We moved out a few days later. We didn't pay the extra rent, but she did keep our deposit. Fair's fair, I suppose.

U.S. Air Force/Sr. Airman Whitney Lambert

But even after moving to a different city, we still weren't done. Nearly six months later, my girlfriend got a phone call from the county's public defender office, saying she'd been subpoenaed to testify in our neighbor's trial. For the defense. She was expected to testify in support of the person that dragged us into this mess. For months, she had anxiety dreams, thinking about having to relive the event in court, in front of the police that tore our house apart, saw her naked, and terrorized us. Fortunately, the day before the trial, our old neighbor ended up taking a plea deal, but the subpoena still caused a huge amount of stress in our lives when all we wanted was to forget any of this happened.

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It's been about a year since the raid, and the trial ended a few months ago, but I am still affected by the ordeal. Whenever a police car pulls up behind me, or I see an officer on the street, I immediately panic, even though I'm not breaking any laws. I'm too terrified to even speed now, because the thought of interacting with a police officer terrifies me, which I guess is probably a net positive for everyone involved? A lawyer told me that I'd probably have grounds to sue the police, but I'd rather just put the event behind me. I don't want money, and I especially don't want to endure a long, drawn-out trial -- I just want to roll an occasional stop sign in peace. It's a meager dream, but it is mine.

Kevin and his girlfriend now run their own graphic and web-design business. You can find it at http://www.asmarterimpact.com/. Kevin also has a Twitter where he says things sometimes.

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