My previous ex was a schizophrenic drug addict, and I didn’t learn any of this until after we were living together (which was mostly my fault – I was in a bad home situation and was eager to move out). Shortly after I moved in we began having relationship issues, and I lived with her for less than two months before I moved out.
I learned that she was an addict a couple of weeks into me moving in, but I was considerate about it because she said she was clean for over a year, and I myself am a recovering addict who has been clean for multiple years. However, I was aware that she had post-traumatic epilepsy and bad anxiety problems, and was prescribed Xanax because of her disorders. While I was living with her, she and her family learned that her father had stage 4 cancer. As a result, she became very depressed and her anxiety sky-rocketed, and out of concern that her daughter would begin to abuse the medication, her mother asked me to hold on to the Xanax and give her her doses a day at a time. My ex expressed that she had no problem with this, but as the weeks passed, she began calling/texting me while I was at school asking where her pills were, for this reason or that reason. Finally, about a week before I left her, I didn’t ask for the pills back – I just let her keep the bottle.
Not 10 minutes after I drove away the day I left her, she called and left me a voicemail accusing me of taking her bottle of Xanax with me and demanding that I call her back. When I left her house she had been very hostile, so I was not interested in speaking to her directly, so I texted her and told her that I hadn’t taken her meds, that I had never asked for them back after the last time she had asked where they were. She didn’t respond. However, two days later I recieved a call from the police department, demanding that I go in and speak to them. The officer threatened that if I did not go in for questioning, they would be forced to file charges against me.
Now, I know very little about the law, and since I had not taken her pills and she had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals quite often as well as had her apartment raided for drugs in the past, I didn’t think anything of leaving and heading out to the station to answer their questions. I explained the situation to my grandmother and dropped my daughter off with her before heading out. However, my mother’s partner works for a law firm, and they contacted me while I was en route and advised that I hire a lawyer so that the police didn’t try to illegally arrest me or trick me into saying anything incriminating. I was just down the street from the police station when they finally convinced me not to speak to the police without a lawyer (I was hesitant at first because I felt that my ex’s history spoke for itself and thought that requesting a lawyer would make me appear guilty, but I wasn’t going to risk getting arrested and not seeing my daughter for who knows how long). The lawyer at the firm offered to help me at a discounted fee, so I called the station and told them that I’d like to have my lawyer present when we spoke, and that he was out of town until the next week (this occurred on a Friday) and they would be receiving a call from him to schedule a day for the questioning.
Luckily I convinced my ex to drop the charges before I ever had to go talk to the police, but I’m glad that I had found a lawyer, because it essentially would have been word against word, and when she called to drop the charges, the policeman in charge of the case was very obviously on her side and disappointed that she wasn’t going any further with it.
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