A warrior now at peace: Robert Foster finds a refuge during his battle with the Sunriver Police Department. |
Robert
Foster was in the company of his family during the early morning hours of
January 16 when his depleted body surrendered his indomitable spirit into
eternity. At his bedside were found his Bible and the pocket-sized copy of the
US Constitution he always carried with him.
The
disease that put Bob into a hospice in Bend, Oregon made its presence known
just weeks before he passed away. Cancer of the liver is difficult to detect
until it has reached a stage at which it is almost impossible to cure.
There
is a chance, albeit an exceedingly small one, that Bob's prospects for survival
would have been better if he hadn't been forced to spend the past seven years
in an expensive and exhausting battle with the abusive political clique that
rules Sunriver,
the tourist enclave in central Oregon where Bob and his family had operated
a successful business.
From
2010 to 2012, Bob was
subject to a court order that allowed Sunriver police to arrest him practically
at will. All that was necessary was for Bob to come within visual range of
either Sergeant
Joseph Patnode or Officer Kasey Hughes,
who had filed petitions accusing Bob of “stalking” them. Those orders were
issued in an illegal ex parte proceeding, and resulted in Bob being arrested on
two separate occasions.
Prior
to those arrests, Bob had never known the indignity of being handcuffed. A
native of the area, Bob established a hot tub service and repair business in
1992 that eventually boasted more than 500 clients – people of means who
eagerly and gratefully allowed him unsupervised access to their property. His
“offense” had been to speak out in local town hall meetings against a scheme to
turn Sunriver's police force into a revenue-collection service for the Sunriver
Owners Association (SROA), the village's equivalent of a city council.
Most
of Sunriver's small population consists of wealthy people who maintain second
homes in the resort community, which attracts over 1,000,000 visitors a year. Until
2007, Sunriver's tiny police force was restricted to investigating crimes
against persons and property.
Because it was a private enclave, rather than
a municipality, Sunriver's streets were considered private roads accessible to
the public rather than “public conveyances,” which
meant that the police couldn't write traffic citations or otherwise exploit
out-of-state motorists as a source of revenue.
This
changed when the SROA prevailed on Oregon State Rep. Gene Whisnat to sponsor a
bill that extended police “authority” to include “premises open to the public
that are owned by a homeowners association.” A year later, the SROA imposed a
multi-million-dollar special tax assessment for the purpose of expanding a
“service district” (SSD) it had created in 2002. In this fashion the Sunriver
PD – whose role had previously been analogous to that played by security
officers in a shopping mall – became a fully realized apparatus of
regimentation and plunder.
Many
Sunriver residents had opposed this scheme in its early stages. Bob was
practically the only one to express that opposition publicly, repeatedly, and
forcefully. After the SSD was created, Bob used town hall meetings to urge its
abolition, pointing out that it was both prohibitively expensive and entirely
unnecessary. Sunriver already received law enforcement “services” from the
Deschutes County Sheriff's Office, and for a fraction of the expense imposed by
the SSD the village could contract with the nearby city of La Pine for
emergency services.
Echoing
the warnings of the men who wrote the Constitution he constantly carried with
him, Bob also protested that the SROA controlled the service district, thereby
consolidating powers that should have been kept separate.
None
of this endeared Bob to the village's entrenched elite.
After
the newly-enhanced Sunriver PD began making life miserable for visitors,
tourists, and businessmen in 2008, Bob became an informal, part-time cop
watcher, taking notes on the behavior of officers and reporting what he found
in town meetings. He was the best and most commendable variety of civic
irritant, and he was an itch that the SROA and their armed flunkies were
desperate to scratch.
There
was no procedural tactic that would prevent Bob from speaking at public
meetings. Sunriver Police Chief Michael Kennedy suggested to the SROA that Bob
be “trespassed” from the town hall. The
SROA's legal counsel – much to its frustration, no doubt – had to veto that
proposal as legally untenable.
Since
the SROA and the Sunriver Police Department had no legal means to silence Bob,
they devised what can only be called a criminal conspiracy to violate his
rights. This is not a matter of speculation. Chief Kennedy disclosed the
details of that conspiracy in a
letter he wrote to the Deschutes County Commission following his termination in
February 2012, and he confirmed his account under penalty of perjury in an
affidavit filed with the County Court the following June.
The
Service District's attorney instructed Chief Kennedy “that we would be filing a
stalking order against Bob Foster,” Kennedy
admitted in his letter to the county commission. “While I was not in favor
of this solution … I followed our legal counsel's advice. At the request of
legal counsel, I contacted Sergeant Patnode and Officer Kasey Hughes to see if
they would be willing to have the stalking orders file on their behalf. They
subsequently agreed and the stalking orders were filed.”
According
to Kennedy, this was done at the initiative of SROA Board President Bob Nelson
and board member Bob Wrightson, both of whom are “also on the Service District
board.”
As officers in a homeowners' association, Nelson, Wrightson, and their
colleagues could not making binding policy decisions regarding the police. However,
as officials in the Service District they had “effective control over the
operations and funds of a public taxing district,” Kennedy pointed out. The
Service District “put entirely too much control into the hands of a small
segment of the community,” he concluded – thereby validating everything Bob
Foster had been saying for ten years.
The
purpose of the stalking orders was not to protect victims of “coercive
harassment”; it was to intimidate Bob Foster into silence. However, as Kennedy
advised the county commission, “Foster didn't immediately roll over.” Kennedy
and the people who employed him were used to dealing with cringing, timid
sycophants; they weren't prepared to deal with an actual man.
After
Bob challenged the stalking orders and filed notice of a tort claim against the
SROA and the Sunriver Police Department, the association “appeared to withdraw
support” from the chief and his underlings, and instructed them “not to talk
about the case.” Board President Nelson, who had devised the plan in the first
place, used an executive (that is, off-the-record) session of the Service
District to upbraid Kennedy for using tax funds to defend the stalking orders
“when this is clearly a civil matter between these two officers and Bob
Foster.”
“I
reminded him that we had asked those officers if they would be willing to file
the stalking orders at the request of legal counsel after he and Bob Wrightson
had directed us to do so,” Kennedy recounted in his letter to the county
commission. “I advised him that if I was asked, that is how I would have to
testify in court.” Following that confrontation, the chief related, the SROA
began to dissociate itself from the matter “even they were the ones who
initially started us down the path of filing the stalking orders.”
Poor, pitiful creature: Officer Casey Hughes is on the right. |
Kennedy
and the two officers who agreed to this arrangement had to place their manhood,
such as it was, in escrow. In seeking a protective order against Bob, Sergeant
Patnode and Officer Hughes had to attest that the mere presence of the slender,
mild-mannered, unarmed businessman induced within them a bladder-loosening
surge of unconquerable fear.
In the
language of the state statute and relevant judicial precedents, the
officers solemnly swore that the sight of Bob Foster left them incapacitated with
“actual fear or terror resulting from a sudden sense of danger.”
When compelled to offer a sworn deposition as part of Bob's lawsuit, Chief Kennedy committed willful perjury in order to maintain the pretense that the victim of a politically motivated conspiracy was, in some sense, a deranged criminal mastermind.
When compelled to offer a sworn deposition as part of Bob's lawsuit, Chief Kennedy committed willful perjury in order to maintain the pretense that the victim of a politically motivated conspiracy was, in some sense, a deranged criminal mastermind.
“He breaks the law all the
time,” Kennedy asserted in his June 15, 2010 sworn deposition.
“Well, have you ever arrested
him?” inquired Foster's attorney, Frank Wesson.
“I have not,” admitted Kennedy.
“Has anyone in your department
ever arrested him?” Wesson persisted.
“Not to my knowledge, sir,” was
the chief's dishonest and non-responsive reply. When asked about the crimes Bob
allegedly committed, Kennedy listed “disorderly conduct, interfering with a
police officer, menacing, harassment, and stalking.”
“Was he ever arrested for any
of those?” Wesson asked the chief.
“No; fortunately for him, no,”
Kennedy replied – without explaining if this reflected culpable incompetence in
the administration of the law, or willful perjury.
“The wicked flee, though none
give pursuit,” the Old Testament instructs us, “but the righteous are as bold
as a lion” (Proverbs 28:1). Bob and his equally redoubtable daughter Rebecca
were eager and prepared for a civil trial; their enemies were just as anxious
to keep the matter out of the courtroom, or any other venue they couldn't
control.
For over a year the SROA and
the police department pursued a “settlement” that would have made the stalking
orders permanent. William Flinn, the Bend attorney who acted as third-party
mediator, urged Bob to accept that arrangement – despite acknowledging that it
was manifestly not in his interest to do so.
"I know Bob feels that,
had he accepted the [settlement] offer, the police still would have found some
way to construe episodes of his future conduct as stalking,” Flinn
wrote to Bob's attorney on July 11, 2011. “But, I don't think that was a
good reason to reject the offer." In a letter sent four days later, Flinn
insisted that “there is virtually no chance that Bob will prevail in court,
despite your excellent trial skills and some evidence of paranoia/lack of candor on
the part of the police." (Emphasis added)
Running out of money and
subject to arrest at the whim of the Sunriver police, Bob was forced into
exile, leaving his business in the care of his employees and spending much of
2011 with family in Florida. He returned the following January 26 for a
long-anticipated court date – only to find that Flinn's prediction was correct.
Bob wouldn't be able to “prevail in court,” because the local judiciary
wouldn't allow him to make his case.
Rather than convening the trial
at the scheduled time and at the designated location, the presiding judge spent
several hours conducting a series of sidebar conferences with the parties in
her chambers as dozens of people, nearly all of them friends of Bob and his
family, waited for several hours in a crowded, poorly ventilated courtroom. In
one corner of the room (seated right next to me, in fact) could be found an ill-disguised
Detective from the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office, who furtively took
photographs of everyone who had gathered to support Foster.
The “deal” presented to Bob by
the judge would leave him subject to the illegally granted protection orders,
but impose the trivial requirement of a judicial hearing before he could be
arrested for a “violation.” This would have made his situation substantially worse,
as the “victims” would have been able to tie Bob up in court, wasting his time
and further depleting his financial resources.
Bob’s refusal to accept the “deal”
precipitated the frantic meeting of the Sunriver Service District that brought
about Chief
Kennedy’s termination, and his “If I Go Down, I’m Taking You With Me”
letter to the Deschutes County Commission. In late 2012, Kennedy – who had
received a $100,000 severance package from the SROA – filed a lawsuit against
his former employer in
the mistaken belief that he was entitled to $1,000,000 to salve his injured
feelings. This made public the former chief’s disclosures about the
criminal conspiracy to deprive Bob of his rights.
And yet the SROA refused to
vacate the spurious staking orders, largely because of a well-founded fear that
Bob would refuse to drop his lawsuit. Unfortunately, Bob’s tormentors were in a
position to exploit funds extorted from tax victims, which meant that they
could simply outlast him.
In January 2013 – a year after
the aborted trial – Bob and his two “victims” signed a “Settlement Agreement
and Mutual Release” in which both the stalking orders and Bob’s lawsuit were
dropped. Rebecca and her husband Ian moved away from Sunriver, and Bob
reluctantly prepared for retirement.
And yet, this still wasn’t the end of the matter.
In January 2014, Michael
Kennedy, who
had used his position and his department’s resources to surveil, harass, and
unlawfully arrest Bob, subpoenaed the victim to testify on his behalf in
his lawsuit against the SROA.
Kennedy was at the center of
the campaign to criminalize Bob – that is, to impose a bill of attainder that
made him subject to arrest merely for being present in the town where he lived
and maintained a business. He committed and abetted perjury in the service of a
criminal conspiracy, and only found his conscience after he had been betrayed
by his co-conspirators.
After Kennedy was fired, “we
tried to get him to meet with us, and he wouldn’t,” Rebecca explained to me. “Then
he changed lawyers, and we made the offer again – and heard nothing, until Dad
got hit with the subpoena. I told Dad that I felt this was some kind of trap
because I don’t trust either party in this lawsuit.”
Rebecca’s concerns were
fortified when Bob received an unexpected – and unofficial – visit from an
Oregon State Police trooper after Kennedy’s subpoena arrived. Without elaborating
on the advice, the trooper told Bob to “be alert and careful.”
This took place in January of
last year. Within a few months Bob was diagnosed with the sickness that ended
his life. He was literally hounded to his death by the feculent cabal that runs
Sunriver, and the vicious little costumed parasites who enforce their will.
That struggle left Bob
physically depleted and severely disillusioned. Like countless others who had
been subjected to the capricious malice of the “justice” system, Bob came to understand
that the Constitution he cherished provided him with no effective protection
against the malevolent intentions of people in power. Even in the depths of his justifiable disillusionment, however, Bob never stopped believing in truth and freedom.
There is no government so small
that it cannot kill or impoverish innocent people. As a result, there are far
too few people who are sufficiently brave and principled to speak the truth about
the behavior and ambitions of those who presume to rule them.
Bob Foster was a man. Take
notes.
Click here to download or listen to this week's Freedom Zealot Podcast.
Click here to download or listen to this week's Freedom Zealot Podcast.
I would appreciate any help you can provide to keep Pro Libertate online. Thank you, and God bless!
Dum spiro, pugno!
Dum spiro, pugno!
9 comments:
Yet some people wonder why cops get shot.
those disgusting pigs in human clothing, by their actions, insure i will never visit that pathetic place.
an additional consideration insuring that i will never visit that place is the "citizenry" which, by letting those activities continue, indicate they actually agree with harassment.
it is my fervent hope they pay a price for what they did...a very big price.
Reading this cements my admiration for outlaws and pirates of old at least they had the decency to shoot you in the face face to face. To risk there lives to get there plunder.
But not today today is risk free white collar crime for gov. Reminds me of documentary about a counterfeiter he said he wouldn't join gangs cause its too much risk little pay white collar is no risk tons of pay by screwing over everyone with a pen and paper.
Mr Foster became a victim of this. shit how could that town surrender to big gov it had good setup till this it began to expand police powers and it went to shit.
Ok so why didn't Foster and his heirs sue in civil court for damages. In theory the attorney behind the stalking order could be disbarred.
He should have used the internet to raise money. George Zimmerman did.
This is the typical way of The Parasite. They serve themselves because they can not make it in the real world. If anyone threatens the livelihood of The Parasite they know that they are in great danger because The Parasite can not make it in the real world. Its a life and death situation to The Parasite. They have nothing to lose if they lose that tax feeder job. They will risk anything and everything being cornered with no way out. Cornering The Parasite is very dangerous and be advised its destroyed many lives who have made the mistake by asking for justice under the law. There is no law in regards to The Parasite.
I suspect that the citizens of this area could erect a billboard (with relevant cameras and security of course) that says "I, officer Patnode, am a lying pants wetting coward." and have a link to more information.
Posts to the internet / facebook, maybe local school web sites.
Perhaps they could even be the first ones up on a new web site PoliceCowards.st
The internet facilitates networking which opposes hierarchies. Hierarchies attract and focus psychopathy and stupid, whereas networking excretes those qualities.
Were I in Bob's shoes, I would have been sorely tempted to extract my revenge on these scum myself after finding out I had very little time to live.
Bill in IL, judgement is not ours, they will be judged, no question about that. Bob was smart to understand that, to have done something like that would make it so he was judged by the same standards that he judged others. Trust me, thats a forever losing situation.
Nevertheless, I bet if we could meet the players/parasites in this matter. One would most likely find that these people are losers in who they are as people. And that they also likely use their positions of power to make up for what they lack social skills. In other words, they talk to other people from a position of power. Government is again most likely the only place they fit in and they only place they can earn the lifestyle that that currently have.
Many people in such positions of power, without that position of power would likely be social outcast. They would have limited friends and many would talk behind their backs about them being strange type people. These are the kinds of people in government today. Need proof, who else could and would do the things that have have done to other people (like Bob) whom have done nothing to them but endanger their criminal enterprise?
These people have taking a position of civil and or public power and have misused it to damage the lives of other. That on judgement day could likely be seen on the same level as a married pastor having sex with some of the woman in his flock. Serious stuff. I can't help wondering if such conduct can ever be forgiving. Time will tell.
Post a Comment