From when I was born until I was eight I lived in the same house. I didn’t live in a very safe neighborhood. Sometimes it got so bad, some nights we would hear screeching tires and gunshots. My mom would tell my sisters and I to get on the floor. There were also times when my dad wasn’t home and the drug dealers down the road would always jiggle the front door knob to scare my mom. Before any of that my family and the one down the road were friendly, but after their uncle moved in, their uncle wouldn’t allow them to talk to us, and was constantly threatening our lives.

At one point, they started selling drugs in my front yard and that made my parents extremely angry, my mom continued to tell them to stop selling drugs in our front yard, but they continued to do it. So, my mom was driving home one day in our truck and saw that he was there again, so she swerved towards him and the curb to make it look like she was going to hit him. He didn’t come back until a few days later. By then my dad had, had it and went outside to tell the guy that if he didn’t leave he would call the cops, this made the guy angry and pulled out a gun and pointed it at my dad’s head. He told my dad to get back in the house or he would pull the trigger, my dad didn’t wait to see if he was bluffing so he came back inside.

My mom and dad had to call the cops on several people in the neighborhood, the drug dealers down the road didn’t need us to call the cops for them to get into trouble they managed it all on their own. A cop was passing by and I was outside playing with my friends across the street when the cops stopped at the drug dealers house. She had noticed that not only was there a car parked on their front lawn which is not allowed, but in fact it had no license plate. She got out of the cop car and walked up to the front door to confront them about it. She walked up to the door and knocked, she had to put her hands over her face because when the uncle opened the door it was obvious that they were doing drugs.

The officer called for backup and they came right away. There was a lot of yelling and screaming, men being handcuffed and shoved into cop cars. I saw their uncle, I could see it took all of his strength not to lash out at the policemen for arresting his nephews. After they had searched the cars and the house, they took the stash of drugs and took the nephews to jail.It didn’t seem they had learned their lesson cause their uncle bailed them out the next day. Till this point I’m still unsure why their uncle didn’t get arrested also, they nephews weren’t the only ones doing drugs.

We also had some pretty mean teenagers in our neighborhood. We had this teenager that would for some reason run through our yard and if we left anything lying around he would steal it so we had to lock everything up in our garage. One day my mom had me go out in the car and get the diaper bag out of the trunk of the car. So, I did, at that time I was about six or seven and I wasn’t very big so I was leaning into the trunk not touching the ground when the teenage boy had come around the house and shoved me in the trunk and shut it. The car we had didn’t have one of those levers that you pull to unlock the trunk from the inside. I was stuck in the trunk for about 20 minutes until my mom heard me screaming. I was scared and crying because of course I was seven and I had no idea what was going on. My mom called the police when I stopped crying and told her what happened. When the police got there she explained what happened. They found the teenage guy the next street over, apparently when they confronted him about it he laughed in their faces. My mom told me later that they sent him to the juvenile detention center for two years.

There is a lot of strange and messed up things that went on in that neighborhood, I’m happy that I finally was able to get out of there and moved to a better neighborhood. So I would be able to start a new and better chapter in my life.