A retired Waynesboro nurse thinks her next-door neighbor is running a meth-cooking operation in his backyard, and she’s made multiple reports to police to try to get them to investigate.
Which, they have. Waynesboro Police shared with us a spreadsheet of calls for service at the residential address dating back to Sept. 27, 2022, showing 25 calls for service, 11 of them for drug-related incidents.
To date, no arrests have been made in connection with the reports, for reasons we will go into later in this report.
The reasons given are of no solace to the woman who reached out to us to ask us to look into things, who is at her wit’s end.
“I can get no response from law enforcement at this time. Perhaps they are going after the big guy, but meantime, this neighborhood is being exposed to dangerous people and dangerous chemicals. I am trying to find someone to help educate the public on this epidemic. Prior to finding out that I have been poisoned for a long time, I had no idea that meth was such a big problem here,” the woman wrote to us by email.
We’ve made the decision in the course of reporting on this story to withhold her name and what part of town she lives in – and the name of her neighbor, who has not been charged with any crimes, and whose name comes up clean in searches of local court records.
There’s two reasons at the basis of the decision not to offer details like names and addresses. The neighbor hasn’t been charged, one, and two, if what we’re told is going on in this story is really going on, the woman who reached out to us to ask us to look into things feels legitimately under constant threat.
As you might be able to tell from the hedge in that last sentence there, one issue for us with the reporting on this story is that the claims from the woman have bordered on the fantastic at times as we’ve corresponded.
When I asked her, for instance, if she knew if other neighbors had raised issues with police, her response was that she observed “other neighbors who are methheads and are communicating with these next-door junkies.”
If we’re to believe her there, the whole neighborhood is full of methheads, which is possible, sure.
She then sent a photo of the next-door neighbor’s yard that purported to show him cooking meth in the backyard that could have been that, or a simple backyard fire pit.
She also sent a photo of a lesion on her forearm that she attributed to exposure to the chemicals in the air that could have been caused by that, or any of a number of other things.
The woman then sent us a lengthy written background of her relationship with the neighbor, who she wrote “helped me with gardening and home repairs for years.”
“I first noticed a change in him when he put a TV on the wall for me in the summer of 2021,” she wrote, and thereafter, she would notice him vomiting, and a smell in the air “like death.”
This went on for months, before the neighbor “accused me of spying on him” last summer.
Feeling threatened, she finally called police, which only made things worse.
“I have been threatened, had a vehicle sit with bright lights at my back gate,” the woman wrote.
“I fear for my safety. I feel like a prisoner in my home, which is definitely not my sanctuary at this time,” she wrote.
As this back-and-forth with the woman was progressing, we were communicating with the Waynesboro PD to try to learn more about what they knew, which wasn’t easy because we didn’t have a lot in the way of specifics.
We reached back out to the woman to ask her for more in the way of corroboration – dates, maybe a connection with a neighbor who has noticed what she has about the alleged drug activity – to be able to push the police department on the details of her claims.
The woman went on the attack against us at this stage.
“Go hide in a corner. You’re certainly not a journalist,” she wrote, which, if you’re reaching out to somebody to get them to look into something on your behalf, and they’re actively trying to help you, that’s maybe not the way to go about it.
It was at this point that we got the spreadsheet from the PD with the long list of calls for service at the address, which seemed to merit one more look.
Twenty-five calls for service at a single residential address in nine months is not nothing.
I got in touch with Waynesboro Police Chief David Shaw, who had this to say about the matter:
“The police department investigates (the woman’s) allegations concerning possible drug activity, and we continue to try to work with her as appropriate to alleviate her concerns and address her contention,” Shaw wrote back in an email.
At the end of the day, then, we have 25 calls for service at this address, the police are looking into the allegations, they have found nothing, and the woman who reached out to us to look into this on her behalf is upset with the police, and with us, because she doesn’t feel like anybody is listening, or cares.
What we can say at the conclusion here is, we’ll continue to keep an eye out on the address, and will report back if it turns out there’s any more to this story.
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Chris Graham
