Here's a little tale about my neighbor.
I don't really know the people who live across the street from my house, even though they've been there for almost as long as we have (at least 17 years). I haven't even seen the father of that household in like a decade. The guy is older and started a family up after he retired, and now he's really getting up his years. Before there'd be an ambulance at their house every now and then, but that seems to have quieted down over the last year or so and everyone assumed the guy got healthier. Nobody really knows since he's become a recluse and never goes outside.
A couple of days ago, we found out that this guy's family had just up and left one evening, leaving him there. Nobody had any idea. He called my father asking for some help with the oxygen tank he's hooked up to, which is the only reason why anyone knows anything now. My father said that the inside of the house looked like it had been ransacked and that the guy was sitting on a couch covered with crap and there was feces and piss on the floor. The neighbor claimed that his back was so bad that he couldn't even get up to go to the bathroom and gave this sob story about his family abandoning him.
My parents then managed to track down his wife and get her side of the story. Turns out that this family didn't run away from home; they left out of fear-- the guy had threatened to beat the shit out of them if they stayed, and even the hospital where he previously stayed at warned his family to leave him alone. This guy is all kinds of fucked up due to various mental illnesses. He is psychotic and has been kicked out of multiple hospitals, banned by the staff from even entering because of constant mental and physical abuse. Even though he is hooked up to an oxygen tank and claims to have a bad back, he apparently can get around just fine and was abusing his family members, screaming at them and occasionally striking them. The guy basically cannot stand to not have attention and wants literally everything done for him. His family has been putting up with this for years, but they've reached a breaking point. The doctors and nurses couldn't take dealing with him for very long at all. They are now looking into having him committed at a specialized hospital that will give him the medical care he needs -whether he wants it or not- and keep him from doing harm to anyone else.
Right now though, he is sitting at home. It's five in the morning, and all the lights in his house have been on all night. All the doors to his home are unlocked. He seems to be getting food and medicine from some taxi service and also from one of his kids who stops by at night to drop off stuff for him, then bolts. The neighbor has been calling most of the neighborhood with his sob story, trying to get people to go out and bring him food and medicine, even though he is perfectly capable of doing everything himself (according to his wife). It's so fucked up.
Small follow-up to this story.
It's been pretty quiet across the street (the lights are still on 24/7 though). We haven't heard anything from the neighbors, although I did find out how it looks inside in more detail-- like a gang partied hard and just fucked up the place, and then took shits and pissed every few feet on the first floor.
Anyway, tonight as I was taking down the trash, I noticed that one of the kids was sitting by himself at the end of his driveway, eating dinner off a plate and reading a book, like this was completely normal. He didn't look up once. It was pretty cold outside, too. He just kind of sat there all emo and not making a sound. I know he can drive, so I don't get why he didn't just up and go somewhere else; he certainly wasn't stuck at his senile-psycho father's place.
