Last night, while I was trying to force myself to get a good night's rest, I randomly remembered the first and only time my dad got arrested by our neighbor.
My dad has always been a calm man, one that hates violence or shady deals and would never put himself in a situation where his name comes up concerning things like that. But during this particular year, we were having a misunderstanding with one of our next-door neighbors because he felt my brother was trying to snatch his girlfriend away from him.
So the whole hatred thing started, and everyone was just trying to be careful about the other person. Well, on this particular evening, our neighbor, who rarely ever went to church, had decided that he was going to a church vigil, so he left that night, and when he arrived the next day, he had gone to the police station to make a complaint, and two officers had accompanied him to come arrest my dad.
Apparently, his story was that he had left for church that night, only to come back and find his room scattered, like someone had gone through his stuff and probably stolen something. And seeing how our doors were right next to one another and we both were the only two people who had access to the gate, then we definitely had been the ones who went through his things.
Luckily for us, my dad knew the right people to call, and he got released that same morning, but when he got back home, he said that while at the station, the police officer had asked him if we locked the gate that night, and my dad had honestly told him yes.
It turned out that being honest at that point was what almost placed him in trouble. The lawyer that had come to get him out had told him that he shouldn't have said what he said, that he should have lied instead and said that we forgot to lock the gate.
And this was because admitting that we locked the gate that night meant we were the only ones who had access to the room, but if we had lied instead, then anyone could have accessed the room, even someone from outside, and that immediately would have made the case a lot more complicated.
It later turned out that the neighbor had purposely left his room that way the previous night to frame us and almost succeeded.
For some reason that story has refused to leave my mind since all those years, because it made me realize how telling the truth in the wrong place and time could ruin your life forever.
