THE VICTIM: Emile Dritch
DATE: Monday, Aug. 22
TIME: Around 1 a.m.
PLACE: 5800 block of Royal
Neighborhood resident Emile Dritch, 46, locked and loaded her gun when she awoke to someone banging on her door around midnight.
There at her door was a homeless woman asking for food and clothes.
Dritch was wary. She didn’t want to take any chances, not after a similar incident occurred a few months ago with a different person. She told the woman to leave.
“I told her the alarm was set and I couldn’t turn it off,” Dritch says. “Then I called the police three or four times, and they didn’t come … they called back on the telephone.”
Dritch thought the woman had left when she heard water from the hose splashing against her bedroom window.
Dritch says it appeared that the woman was attempting to bathe herself.
So she called the police again.
“And they didn’t come. They said they know her, and she doesn’t seem to be violent,” Dritch recalls.
But according to police records, officers were dispatched and had arrived at the home in seven minutes.
“There was no offense,” says Deputy Chief Elliston of the North Central Patrol Station, explaining that since the woman had left the location prior to the arrival of the police, there was nothing they could do.
The next morning around 8:30 a.m., the same woman was knocking on Dritch’s door again. This time Dritch didn’t answer. And once again, she called the police. This time they came in less than 18 minutes.
But, Dritch says, “they said they couldn’t do anything.” She adds that the responding officers would not press trespassing charges.
“I had to press charges for her stealing water,” says Dritch, which she did because the water had been left running.
While responding to Dritch’s call, the police received another complaint about the same woman from a bank at the
They issued the woman a citation for theft of the water, which, says Elliston, is comparable to a traffic ticket.
Elliston says that in order to press trespassing charges, a property owner, in the presence of police officers, must tell someone “you are never to come on my property ever again.”
“Then if she does come back, she can be charged with criminal trespassing,” he says.
“The reason for that,” he says, “is that the court requires us to prove the person has been warned.”
But Dritch says she is disappointed in the response she received from the police in this incident. She says that although the police are familiar with the woman and they view her as harmless, that doesn’t mean nothing should be done.
“The thing about it is somebody is going to get hurt,” Dritch says. “I don’t know if they are armed,” she says referring to the woman and anyone else who may be banging on her door in the middle of the night.
And, she says, “my house is very visible — what happens with the houses that aren’t so visible behind me?”
