I was lying in my son’s bed; my hands covering my eyes as tears streamed down my face. Could this really be happening, or was it some terrible nightmare? It was the early evening of Friday, September 6, 2024. My apartment—full of my personal possessions, my sons’ keepsakes, furniture, dishes, everything—was now a prison of sorts. A negative bank balance loomed over me like a sentence, and the reality sank in: I had only three days left to move out before the September 9 deadline. Three days until myself and my boys, ages 8 and 11, were supposed to move in with Heather and her son, Caleb.
But now? I didn’t even have the time or means to make that happen.
The apartment was a slum, just like the duplex next door, where the landlord himself lived—a grotesque, lumbering beast of a man. Ned Mast, a slumlord of Woburn, Massachusetts. He ran his life like his business, half-heartedly managing his failing tree service from the cushion of a sunken couch, barking orders at undocumented workers who took the jobs no one else would. His routine rarely changed: cheap cigars, foreign prostitutes, and a stench of rotting indifference. I’d suspected for months that he had been sending his “employees” into my apartment while I was away. There was always something… off. Small things moved, strange creaks in the floor when I wasn’t home. But nothing ever stolen.
I needed proof. So, I installed a hidden camera.
On August 8, I got it. A notification pinged on my phone as I sat with Heather at her place in Jamaica Plain: “Motion Detected.” My stomach twisted as I opened the app, and there it was—clear as day. One of Mast’s workers was stepping through my door like he owned the place.
I showed Heather the footage, my hands trembling with a mix of vindication and dread. “I told you. I wasn’t paranoid.”
She stared at the screen, silent for a long time, before finally nodding. “You were right.”
I immediately texted Mast: “Who the hell is in my apartment!? I’m calling the police!”
Then I dialed 911.
What followed was a barrage of calls and texts—first from Mast himself, then from blocked numbers, even from a few disguised as contacts I might trust. His desperation seeped through every word, but I wasn’t answering.
When Heather and I arrived at the apartment later that morning, we were greeted by two Woburn police officers. They looked professional enough—standard uniforms, polite expressions—but I could feel something beneath the surface. Something rotten. Woburn was a town where allegiances ran deep, and Mast was one of their own. Blue-collar, born and raised in Woburn, just like most of the cops in this town. A man who shared their views, voted their way, and likely shared a drink or two at the local bar.
I felt the weight of it in their questions, in their nonchalant glances. I wasn’t going to get justice here. Not from them. They left without so much as a warning to Mast.
Afterward, Heather and I went for lunch to clear our heads. She suggested I take some time to calm down, but my mind was spinning. I couldn’t stop thinking about that camera footage, the police, the move in three days, and all that still needed to be done.
When I got back to the apartment later, alone, I barely had time to pull into the driveway before I saw him. Mast was there, lumbering toward my car, his face flushed with anger. His bulk blocked the doorway as I stepped out, and for a moment, I wondered if this confrontation was what he wanted all along.
He wanted immediately tried some Trumpian-style tactic to try and change the narrative of the conversation away from his break-in and on to something, anything else. The topic he chose? The “mess” in the basement, which apparently the police had told him about (which is laughable in retrospect).
He gave me some cock and bull story about how the basement was messy and posed a fire hazard to the furnace (in the middle of the summer) and that it needed to be immediately cleaned so he could inspect it. I told him, “Listen, you’re not inspecting shit. You’re under investigation for sending one of your lackeys into my apartment to break-in for God-knows-why, and I can’t even begin to comprehend why, because I don’t live in a world or paranoia like you do. No one with any affiliation to you is entering these premises under any circumstances. I have records of representatives of yours’ breaking-in on multiple occasions, so it’s not happening. Stop trying to change the narrative.”
But this was just the beginning of my troubles as I digress. Back to the early evening of Friday, September 6, 2024.
Heather and I had intended to move in together; however, she had pulled the plug on that at the last second–leaving me with nowhere to go and no solution in sight. After a month of harassment by Mast and the Woburn PD, and now my girlfriend up and deserting me, I was all alone. Even my only remaining family in Michigan wanted nothing to do with me.
I had been tormented by traumas which came to a fever pitch over the summer of 2020 which ultimately led to the correct diagnosis (finally) of c-PTSD at Butler Hospital in Providence, RI. But this in and of itself led to additional traumas which surely I will get to in additional posts. But this was reckoning time.
I was furious. I had done nothing but love and help Heather through the tragic recent loss of her brother and subsequent recurrence of anorexia which started affecting her memory and cognition. She wouldn’t even return a message.
Lying there in my son’s bed, not knowing what to do and in total desperation, my phone rang. It was my psychiatrist of many years who I could not see anymore due to a change in healthcare coverage. He had been called by Heather and advised me to go to the ER for admission into the psychiatric unit at Emerson Hospital in Concord, MA.
But what about all of my stuff? What would happen to that? Oh well… I packed a few things, hopped in my car, and took the most somber drive of my life. And that is where this blog post ends and the next will pick up.
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