Expensive Meal

In my early years I was not only the youngest in the household, I was the only girl out of 4 children. My mother worked full time at a lawyer’s office and her alcoholic husband, Terry Valentine, worked at the marina next to John’s Pass Village. I had very little discipline and in my free time that was unsupervised by any adult, I broke into neighboring houses and stole miscellaneous items to give to my brother Doug. Giving Doug these items would allow me to gain entrance into his/our room, where he and his good looking friends would be smoking weed listening to late 70s early 80s rock-n-roll. I was quite the thief and this continued on into my teen and even adult years. After several trips to prison, I had a judge tell me if I came before him again for any type of theft or fraudulent activity, I’d be receiving a life sentence. As I reflect back on my charges and my criminal history, my mind goes back to 1986. I had committed a string of burglaries, I was no longer stealing trinkets to bring home to my brother Doug, I was moving out furniture, audio/video equipment, gun collections, you name it, it was a job and how I earned money to buy my shoes, clothes, and party.

Upon my arrest by the detectives who worked for the Jango Police Dept. in Pinellas County, Florida, I was questioned about my criminal activities. I was only approximately 15 years old and at that time I thought I had all the sense. The detectives told me that they were on to me and asked would I help them clear their case load up by riding around with them and showing them which burglaries I was responsible for, they told me they would tell the state attorney how helpful I had been and could get a more lenient penalty. I told them to take me to Red Lobster (which back then was way more popular than it is today) and I would go ahead and confess to the case load of burglaries. I was helping them, they would be helping me and id get a steak dinner before being booked into the juvenile detention center where I’d be receiving an automatic 21 days, I may have committed ¼ of what I confessed and to this day my second is extremely larger than it may have been. Florida works on a point scale and every arrest after that the points add to those.

- Dawn Kennelly