Following on from yesterday.
I spent Christmas worrying about the court case that everyone I spoke to said, “I can’t believe they’re bothering with this, it’s ridiculous.”
The reason the police took it so far was because there was a child involved. The fact that the allegation was entirely fabricated, made-up and in essence, a lie, made no difference.
I find it easy to go over details in my head and the more I thought about it all, the clearer to me it became. The three that I had argued with in the street had gone home and cooked-up this whole thing.
No one had been hurt or injured (except me, run-over by a buggy), no child had been harmed. They were lying.
The question of why they were lying hasn’t been made clear to me. I can guess, but I’ll never know for sure. I believe it was for compensation of some sort.
I received a letter soon after Christmas. An appointment for the MRI scan – at last, a possible diagnosis for the dizziness.
There were so many things to worry about over Christmas that I guess they all rolled into one and I couldn’t hope to think straight.
The day of the court case was scheduled a week after the MRI scan.
In the couple of weeks before the trial, I was busy getting everything together. A letter from my Physio, witness statements typed up and emailed to my Solicitor, and getting my head right around the facts as I remember them.
I’d had one lucky break, one of Haydn’s friends had sent him a text.
I saw what happened to your mum, is she ok?
That friend was asked if he’d go to court as my witness. He agreed, as did the friend Haydn walked up the street with that day.
Trev drove that day. We picked up the witnesses and went into Derby for the trial. Dani wasn’t able to make it, she’s exceptionally ill and I told her it would be too much for her.
I had to sit in the court alone, off to one side. The Magistrates’ desk was elevated, but not to the same extent as the one before.
Trev sat in the back for moral support.
The first complainant came into the court. She swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Prosecutor asked the relevant questions and she painted herself as a meek and mild-mannered victim right from the off.
She claimed I’d ‘lunged out of the car’ at her for no reason, shouted, “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and chased her off up the street, reaching out to grab her. She said I used both hands to reach for her clothes, her hair and anything. She could “feel her presence right behind,” as she tried to escape.
When asked if she swore at me, she shook her head and denied swearing because there were children about. She demurely claimed that I said “the ‘F’ word a lot,” but flat-out denied swearing back at me.
She claimed I had pushed the child into a wall in my efforts to get at her.
My Solicitor asked her a few similar questions. Then he asked if she had confronted Haydn that morning about the friend who fetched Mia.
She denied that too.
“Just one moment, excuse me,” he said, leafing through a copy of her statement. “In the statement you gave to the police, you said that you confronted him in the morning.”
“Oh yeah, that,” she said. “She (the friend) has no right to go to that school. She doesn’t have any kids there.” She became a little irate, and her voice raised.
Then asked if she knew who I was before the incident, and whether I knew her. She admitted she didn’t know who I was and therefore it was reasonable that I wouldn’t know her.
“So why would a stranger suddenly leap out of a car?” my Solicitor asked. “Was it because you threatened her granddaughter?”
She denied that too. She repeated her denials of swearing. Not one ‘F’ word passed her lips.
When asked what I had said, she told him that I had said, “I’m going to ‘effing’ kill you for threatening my granddaughter!”
He also asked how she had witnessed the child being pushed into a wall if she was trying so desperately to get away.
“I kept looking over my shoulder,” she replied.
He ended his questions with, “I think you’re lying.”
She undid all her work at being a meek, mild-mannered and demure woman by laying into him, verbally. She didn’t hold back when she told him exactly what she thought of him, Haydn, and the friend that fetched Mia when Tammy was so ill and she ended with a real eye-opener.
“She has no right to be at the school! She doesn’t even live ‘round there! What’s she even doing at the school?”
She also went on to tell the court exactly where I live and admitted, without prompting, that she looked me up on Facebook and found my address etc. from there.
She claimed that she got the vehicle registration number of my car when I drove up the street past them. She made a point of mentioning that fact and I realised that the police had told her to mention it because I had queried it when I gave my own statement.
Something to think about: If they had the car registration number when she gave her statement as she claimed, why did it take almost three months for the police to find me?
The second witness came in. She too was sworn in and promised to tell the truth. She also claimed that neither of them swore at me during the argument, but I yelled, 'I'm going to 'effing' kill you for threatening my granddaughter!'
When she was asked about the claim that a ‘crazy woman’ had pushed her child into a wall, she said she went to comfort him.
“You said in your statement that you stood between your friend and the defendant,” my Solicitor said, leafing through her statement.
“Yes,” she said. “I went to comfort my child, then I stood between them.”
“You left your child crying on the street?” he asked.
“No, I carried him with me,” she said.
“You took your distressed child with you to confront a ‘crazy woman’?”
And there it was again, a point of continuity that I had brought up in my own statement, altered to suit the situation and fed-back to the witness.
I was beginning to think I wasn’t being paranoid, I’d been ‘fitted-up’.
More tomorrow…