Fear and Jaywalking In Las Vegas

Three months ago i was stopped for jaywalking in Las Vegas (Paradise and Twain) and was illegally searched (more on this later). The police found a small quantity of methamphetamine, which i was using for cognitive enhancement (as a 51 yo full stack webdev it, without doubt, helped with keeping my skills cutting edge), and heroin, used for chronic pain relief (I have a 40yo torn ACL injury that hurts like hell these days and a ruptured knuckle ligament in my right pinky, both basketball injuries).

I was arrested and eventually took a 90-day county sentence, even though my public defender, after reviewing the body cam video, was 100% sure that no probable cause existed for the search. When asked for consent for a search, I specifically told the officer “no”, but was searched anyway, thus violating my civil and constitutional rights as he had not established any “probable cause” facts at the time.

I took a 90-day “deal” because charges were dropped to a misdemeanor and no you-fail-by-design probation would be added to jail term. I, sensibly, was scared by the prosecutor’s threat that if we challenged the arrest and lost, I would be looking at a 1 to 4 year prison sentence. I was given about a minute to make the decision, which is totally absurd when you think about what’s at stake, but such is how the system churns and abuses its most helpless victims.

I kicked cold turkey in jail, not eating for 8 days and going through all the typical symptoms. I had no phone numbers memorized so during my entire 67 day locked up period (Clark County Detention Center gave me 23 days off my full sentence for gain time) I was only able to call my youngest son some two weeks into the sentence. I was working a very successful contract at the time as a full-stack PHP/JS/API developer and my sudden unexplained disappearance of course ended my employment with that company, a job I very much enjoyed, worked damn hard at, and provided a secure living.

Life in CCDC wasn’t horrible, and I am very grateful I was provided with a safe place to kick, but the forced 60 hr/week kitchen work was akin to slave labor. The worse part by far was, of course, that I lost my much loved remote webdev job and all of my property in the weekly apartment I was renting. Every last thing I owned…my computers, 40” monitor, my much loved Martin acoustic, mixing board, soundbar, high end studio monitors, clothes…everything was lost after 30 days absence.

All I have to my name now are the few clothes on my back and my beloved Huawei Honor 8 phone that I am using to write this.

It’s been over a month since I was released and I have been living at a shelter on Las Vegas Blvd. I only recently once again replaced the necessary USB-C cable needed to charge my phone, after having it and all my other meager possession stolen while I slept. Thankfully, I slept with the phone under my pillow.

So in a nutshell, my life was irrevocably destroyed by the procedurally illegal actions of the Las Vegas Police Department. I had spent 3 long hard years rebuilding my professional life after a decade long stint as a small business owner with my ex-wife, and I have absolutely no assets or hardware to start working again. Yes, my choice to use unprescribed street drugs to treat my conditions might seem suspect to some (or most), but with a health care system as broken as ours is and the current hysteria about prescribed pain medications, it just didn’t make sense to try that route at the time.

This is something I’ve come to, perhaps, reconsider in light of my bleak situation now.

I am asking if anyone could see to bless me with a small donation or, even better, perhaps an old unused laptop to use to help me find work and get out of this shelter and rather hopeless situation. I feel that my life was illegally and unfairly ripped away by the actions of police officers who clearly had no respect for a citizen’s right to privacy. As I said, I have one shirt, one pair of jeans, shoes and socks and my phone and that’s it. The shelter makes us check in to get a bed by 4:30 so I’ll have to leave it to work longer hours.

Of course, many of you will laugh out loud at my request for assistance and, in fact, will believe that I either got what I deserved and/or will not use any received funds in a proper manner due to my background. All I can say to this is that I was using both drugs in a very responsible way and had been working very successfully in Vegas for 11 months without any incident whatsoever before the illegal arrest.

What I absolutely refuse to do is turn all of this into a played-out, silly morality meme about the “horrors” of drug use and how “I’ve seen the light” and now will 12-step my way into sobriety forever. No…this is NOT that episode of your favorite 80’s or 90’s drama.

In this time, I developed bots using the Facebook and Twitter APIs, decoded and re-purposed an extremely arcane Medispan relational DB schema for pill and drug identification for web delivery, designed the full featured API interface embedded in the site controllers and views for easy modification and maintenance for a mobile app, and built a modern admin backend that used x-editable for efficient UX, among many other things.

Basically, I am highly experienced in all aspects of modern web development and am looking for a remote opportunity to use my skills for my clients business or personal needs.

I started programming on a TRS-80 in BASIC in the late 70’s and moved to FORTRAN, some Pascal, then C professionally for a decade with and without SQL, writing multi-user realtime interactive games for BBS systems. Moved into corporate networked C++ Builder/MSVC++/JAVA, and finally LAMP-Stack based web development in 2004 with PHP, MySql and of course JS.

Due to the high cost of basic health care and my long experiences with narcotics, I know that both drugs truly helped improve both my quality of life and quality of work, no matter what the common perceptions are of them. Your experience with these drugs, and/or the people you know whom use them, are not mine…please try to keep that in mind before judging me, if possible.

Since I have to give my real name for the PayPal donation link, I am exposing myself at great risk to myself and my job opportunities, but after being a member of the Hacker News community for several years now, I feel that this is a chance for HN to prove if it really believes the messages of understanding, forgiveness, and social enlightenment, or is it all just bullshit hypocritical social signaling.

The shelter that I’m at does not allow incoming mail, so I do not, as of today 5/07/17, have a mailing address for anyone interested in blessing me with a laptop…If anyone expresses an interest in this I will look into mail options. My family, consisting of 2 sons and a beautiful daughter, have done what they can to help me, and I love them dearly for it, but they are living their own lives and I can ask no more from them.

My PayPal donation url is

I am aware that the most probable outcome of this effort is that I expose and blacklist myself to the world and get almost nothing in return.. I’m ok with this result and at least I would have learned something interesting.

Also, if anyone has a short or long term remote project in PHP, giving me an opportunity to help you achieve your goals would be the best gift of all. Please feel free to contact me at lampdeveloperforhire@yahoo.com.

Thank you for hearing me out and God bless for any donations you may be inclined to give.