A single mother from Milwaukee and her autistic son have been harassed for weeks by a group of kids who badly damaged her truck and threatened her with bottles and 2x4s. But when she called police, responding officers did nothing...even as the children continued harassing them.
The woman, identified only as Heather for her protection, documented her ordeal in a series of social media videos. In one, she talks to a 911 dispatcher as the children batter her car with rocks.
As Heather explained, the children were playing with her son without incident for several days in early May before she says they began hitting him. When she told them to stop, she claims, the harassment began.
"About 15 minutes later, they came by my house and that's when it all started," she said in an exclusive interview with "The Dan O'Donnell Show" on Friday. "They started screaming at me and threatening me so I started recording because these are children and I'm an adult."
Heather borrowed her neighbor's phone and called 911, but spoke with a dispatcher for roughly 20 minutes without any officers arriving on the scene.
"They were breaking things in the back of my truck," Heather said, noting that she had just purchased the truck for her junk removal business a few weeks earlier. "They busted my windshield up real good and put dents all in the front of my hood. They attempted to break the rest of my windows and fortunately weren't able to, but they did scratch them up pretty good."
Heather's video reveals one of the children--a girl who appears to be between the ages of 13 and 16--throwing multiple rocks at the truck before grabbing a large stone and slamming it into the windshield.
Police officers did not arrive on the scene until well after the children left. They took a statement from Heather and filed a report on the incident. Later that evening, the children returned and smashed Heather's windshield again.
The following night, the children returned to Heather's home and again harassed her, screaming obscenities and threats of violence until she called police. However, when officers arrived, they refused to take the children into custody even after they began harassing and threatening the officers themselves.
In a video of the incident Heather recorded and shared to social media, one of the officers repeatedly yells at the children to go home, but ignores Heather's pleas to arrest them. Another officer grows angry with her for what he calls her refusal to cooperate and give a statement.
Heather responds that she had just filed a police report and has video evidence of the same children damaging her car, but the officers still refuse to take any of them into custody. After about 20 minutes, the mother of two of the children take them away from the scene as Heather asks the officers to call a supervisor.
In a different video Heather recorded, the supervisor arrives and promises to "yell at [his] officers" for their refusal to arrest the children.
"I don't care if the kid is 18 or 12, he's going to jail tonight," the supervisor tells Heather.
On "The Dan O'Donnell Show" Friday, Heather said two of the children were taken into police custody that night.
"But they were back at my house at 8:30 the next morning."
Heather revealed that the children have returned to her home "pretty much every day" since, even bringing adults with them. While there have been no more explosive encounters like the ones she captured on video, she says that both children and adults alike have been slowly walking, riding bikes, and driving past her house and making intimidating gestures or yelling at her.
"I feel like a prisoner inside my house," Heather said.
She has since moved her autistic son in with a relative and her two younger children in with their father. She, however, remains in the house but has plans to move.
"I just really need to get out of here," she said.