He dropped out of school against his father’s advice so he could make some quick money laying cable, got injured at work and then got addicted to the prescription fentanyl patches. But if his father’s middle class ambitions had fallen apart after 50 years, Dave Jr.’s collapsed by the time he turned 20. He’d modeled himself after his father, umpiring alongside him in high school and riding with him on private investigations to train as his apprentice. found now at the bottom of the cardboard boxes.ĭave Jr. He was hoarding the family’s household items and hiding them in his room - cellphone chargers, magnets, pencils and razors that Dave Jr. He was trying to make TikTok videos for a profit.

He was buying and reselling Tasers on the Internet. He was starting a photography business in the backyard.

He moved in with his son and tried to redeem himself by opening a string of businesses, each more desperate and more leveraged than the last, until they seemed to Dave Jr. He had his first heart surgery in 2010 and went thousands of dollars into medical debt. His next wife became addicted to opioids and stole what little money he had left. sank his half of their money into Detroit-area real estate, only to see values drop 82 percent from 2006 to 2008 in the Great Recession. There was his associate’s degree in criminology, his police badge and a picture of him posing with his wife in front of a little red Mustang at their three-bedroom house, just before things began to unravel. There was Dave Sr.'s Army enlistment form, where he’d lied about his birth date to make himself a year older, so he could serve in Vietnam. Kristal sat on the bed and started sifting through the first box.

Death in Focus by S.R. Garrae