The first time I heard from Elizabeth Heisser was a week ago. The 55-year-old woman was standing on her porch, crying her eyes out.
The cops, she explained, had threatened to take her to jail. They finally decided to hand her a ticket for disorderly conduct and left.
“It’s so unfair!” she wailed. “People can do all of this, and I get the ticket!”
The story of Heisser, the police and her neighbors on Irving Street in Westminster is a long one. It dates to 1988, when she and her husband moved in with their developmentally disabled daughter, Katrina. That was the year Elizabeth first walked three houses down to ask the young men living there to lower the volume on their music.
It really is all about Katrina, now 24, who also suffers a seizure disorder that can be triggered by loud music.
The young men told her they were gang members. And to go away.
It was about 2 a.m. one morning when Heisser first called the police.
In what would become a pattern, by the time officers arrived, the music had been turned off.
Still she would call them an average of at least once a year.
“If we come back here again,” they finally told Elizabeth Heisser and the neighbors at the gang house, “somebody is going to jail.”
The gang house residents moved away in 1998.
“It was quiet here awhile. It lasted a few years,” Heisser said.
New people moved in. But then came the Latin music. And four houses down, the young boy who lived there when the Heissers moved in was now in his 30s. He liked rap music. And he liked it loud.
So over the past several years, the Elizabeth Heisser-police-neighbor wheel began spinning again. Over the past three years, she estimates, she called the police at least five times.
On Friday afternoon, it all came to a head.
Heisser was waiting for Katrina to be returned in the van that takes and drops her off from the facility she attends for six hours every day. The music from down the street was deafening.
“Yes, I was mad,” Heisser recalled. “If you knew of my daughter’s condition,” she adds, her voice trailing off.
But this time, she did not call the police. The boy-turned-man, was waiting for her on his porch. It wasn’t him, he told her, pointing to the house next door. She lit into him anyway.
“I did yell at him, but only because I was angry for everything over all of these years,” she admitted.
Katrina’s van arrived. Elizabeth Heisser went home.
An hour later, there was a knock on the door. It was the police. The boy-turned-man had called and filed a complaint against her.
She is due in Westminster court Nov. 25.
“I am going to fight it. It is so unfair,” she says, crying once more. “I’m the one made out to be the bad guy. I am only concerned about my daughter.”
She and her husband had thought of moving away, back in the gang- house days. Now, she says, they are really considering it.
She stops.
Katrina paws at her.
“But I don’t want to move out of Adams County,” Elizabeth Heisser says, crying once more. “She really needs the services.
“She doesn’t handle change well.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@ .
Editor’s note: This story has a correction: In Bill Johnson’s column, reference was made to a “gang house” three doors down from the subject of the column, Elizabeth Heisser. Steve Olson, who lives three houses down, said he has lived there for two decades and that the so-called gang house was farther down.
