Neighbor From Hell

You can find a never-ending amount of stories about bad neighbors to read on the Internet. Stories ranging from the mild inconveniences of neighbors leaving trash at their door living in an apartment, to destroying doorbell cameras because they don't want to be watched stealing your packages. My family had to deal with the mild since our first apartment. It's when we had an unfortunate experience with former family that was suppose to be people we trusted force us to look for a new place to live. After living in a hotel for three weeks, we finally found a nice place for a good price to rent. A condo in an old town that gets a lot of traffic and has plenty of cool things to do, perfect area for my son to grow up in. Little did we know that we would have a neighbor experience horror story like we've only read about.

It's been 2 years of our neighbors hating us living here because we have a child. And not just any child, we have a non-verbal autistic kid. The condo we live in is in an old three story brick building built in the 80's. We live in one of the condos that have two floors (second and third story). Nice place for the rent we pay. Our landlord is amazing and very understanding of our situation. The only other renter in this building is the sixty-four year old man that lives below us. Everyone else owns the condo they're living in. Since day one, our neighbor below has hated us living here. From banging on his ceiling, blaring his music to the point of rattling pictures off our wall all day when he leaves for work 7:30am - 5:30pm, blaring music at early times in the morning to wake my son up (between 12am - 5am), to yelling matches between him and I outside, he's done it all.

We try our best to curb the noise our child makes but, kids will be kids and autistic children are a little harder to reign in. We've done everything from keeping our child upstairs only, taking away all his toys that could be used to make noise (banging, throwing, etc), even making sure we whisper when we talk. None of that has worked. Our landlord had a mediation with our neighbor and the solution was to put carpet and padding down to mitigate the noise from our footsteps. The day our landlord came over to lay the padding and carpet down, the moment he was done and out the door, our neighbor started blaring his music. We didn't even get to walk on the carpet yet before he got mad.

At this point, we went back and forth with trying to be good neighbors to just not giving a damn. All that did was drive us to a lot of stress and anxiety in everything we did while home. You never knew if walking down the steps to get dinner (yes we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner upstairs because of our neighbor), would set off the "Wobble Alert". Our neighbor's song that he would play constantly when he was mad at us was The Wobble by V.I.C. which is an odd choice since it's not the kind of song you would expect from our neighbor if you saw him. I'm still trying to come up with a way to have a light and audible sound to happen when the "Wobble Alert" happens. Gotta make fun out of the hatred somehow.

All the other neighbors in this building are on his side and were caught on camera saying that they're trying to get rid of us. Yes, we have cameras in the from and back of the property (we have a private parking lot for everyone that lives in the building) for our own protection. It helps that the cameras tell us when our packages/mail are delivered. We tried the local police but they cited him once for loud music past quiet hours. They have to catch him playing the music on their body cams (which I think is BS) in order to cite him. They never make it in time due to the response time by the police on a non-emergency call. Even if we show them video proof of the music being obnoxiously loud to the point you can hear it across the street on the opposite sidewalk, they tell us that they can't use the evidence since it was not captured in the presence of an officer.

We gave up on the police since the officer that shows up said something to me that raised a red flag the last time I called about loud music at night (3:30am). He repeated a line of dialogue that I have only heard once and it was from the neighbors next to the one below us three days earlier. It was word for word what she said that the officer repeated to me. That right there made me believe that the officer was in contact with our other neighbor and nothing would ever be done again with regards to our neighbor below breaking the law. My family and I are slowly getting use to the loud music and try our best to ignore it. The more we ignore it, the hopes of our neighbor getting tired of doing it and not getting a reaction out of us helps us through it all. We have gone outside with our neighbors being out as well and have done pretty well with ignoring them. It seems when you don't feed the hate, they have nothing to say anymore. We could've moved to avoid all of what we endured in the two years living here, but my wife grew up in this town and I like this town for my son to grow up in. It also doesn't hurt that we actually have a caring and good landlord, which is very rare these days.