Cannibals With Cutlery

Carolyn Brewer was startled by the unannounced presence of an armed man in her bedroom. Her mood didn’t improve when the intruder sternly ordered her, “You don’t get up.” That directive was issued in the interest of “officer safety,” which presumably would have been undermined if the 74-year-old woman had somehow roused herself from her sickbed.

“I was in bed and it was dark, and he came in and announced who he was,” Brewer recounted to me. “He had a big spotlight and just said, `It’s Fish and Game, we came here we have to search your room.’ I asked why, but he wouldn’t tell me why. I told him that I’m a widow, and I’m sick, and that I didn’t want him in my room. But he searched it anyway.”

Brewer rents a room in the Caldwell, Idaho home of Kenneth and Carrol Watson. She was sleeping when Lori Alley, one of the couple’s adult daughters, knocked on the bedroom door to tell her that an officer from the Idaho Department of Fish & Game wanted to search the room. Brewer groggily replied that she wanted to be left alone, and went back to sleep. A few minutes later, she told me, the officer “startled me awake” by barging in despite the elderly woman’s desire to be left in peace.

The imposition was brief, but thoroughly unpleasant. The officer went through Brewer’s closet and tried to look under her bed. While pawing through the victim’s belongings the officer knocked over a heater, an act of heedless negligence that could easily have led to a catastrophic fire (for which he would not have been held liable, given that he is imbued with that magic property called “qualified immunity”).

Finding nothing of interest, he left without a word of explanation or apology, leaving a traumatized septuagenarian in his wake.

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