It was the typical thing: You do insane shit every day and then you get busted for something completely ordinary. Four months earlier, my buddy and I had been leaving a Walmart, stoned out of our minds, when he’d spotted a convertible sitting in the lot with its top down.
“Hey, Brendan, look at this,” he called out to me.
I looked over. There was a GPS unit, a nice one, sitting on the guy’s dash. And a radar detector.
“Should I grab it, dude?”
I was floating on Planet Stoner. “What?”
“The shit inside. Should I grab it?”
“If you have the balls,” I said. “Which you don’t.”
I was just busting on him. We didn’t steal things. We were partiers, not thieves.
I got in my car without a second thought. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friend plop into the passenger seat with the GPS unit and the radar detector in his hand.
Whatever, I thought. We rolled out of there to another party and I forgot all about it. Later on, I stuck the GPS under my bed and never used it. It was a goof, a stupid dare. I don’t approve of stealing things, but really, grabbing a GPS was pretty low on the totem pole of what we were doing at the time.
Cut to four months later.
A friend from high school returned from college and we decided to meet up at the gym owned by our old wrestling coach. We’d goof around and lift weights. I drove to the place and slapped hands with my friend and his dad, who was a mentor of mine from high school, and then we went into the gym and started lifting. That’s when three guys in Dockers, long-sleeved shirts, and ties walked in and said, “Is Brendan McDonough here?”
I walked over, still breathing hard from the workout.
“I’m Brendan,” I said.
They showed their badges. Prescott PD. “You’re under arrest,” one of them told me.
I was so ashamed. My face burned. My friend, his father, and my old coach looked at me and you could tell they were embarrassed to be there, to be seeing me at such a low moment in my life.
The funny thing is, I thought they were busting me for selling pot. Turned out it was the GPS sitting under my bed that had done me in. I was charged with a felony: receiving stolen property. The cops had gotten my license plate number from a surveillance video and had been following me around for months, thinking I was the head of some major theft ring. How they managed to miss my rampant dealing and out-of-control drug use is beyond me.
I spent the next few nights in jail over Christmas. I saw another guy who’d been arrested at the same time I was get released in the morning, but my mom wanted to teach me a lesson. She refused to bail me out. I spent my time teaching other inmates about how to get federal aid for college. Later I’d run into one of the guys I met that night and find out he was enrolled in school because of my advice. I got a kick out of that.
But mostly, I felt that my life was essentially over. Deadbeat dad. Felon. Loser. Those were the words that floated through my mind as I sat on my concrete bunk.
The DA tried to get me and my buddy convicted of a string of robberies that we had nothing to do with. He was asking for fifteen years for both of us. But there was no evidence—because we hadn’t done the crimes—and the judge threw out the charges. I was left with one felony count of trafficking in stolen property. I pleaded guilty, my first conviction. Because I’d shown some direction in my life—illustrated by the fire academy and the junior ROTC I’d completed in high school—I was given probation. If I stayed clean, the charge would be knocked down to a misdemeanor within a few years.
But, still, I was a felon. I hated that word. I hated being known as a thief. It was another black mark on a life that was going nowhere.