B (111:22)
When, you know, you come back from that extended weekend. I'm like, hey, I need you to come in and sign something. Which was our insurance renewal. And there was a form you had to sign. And I had an invoice for him. And so I see him face to face, guys, Some tensions happen with it. It's. It's tertiary. He kind of harassed my secretary on a medical issue. But nonetheless, back to the bank thing, he wasn't even on the bank account. So in the end of the game here, it's bank fraud. He went to. It'd be like me going to your bank account, which maybe is in town here, right? Go in and say, hey, I want to freeze Andy's bank account. And they're like, like, okay, somebody's going to be like, that's probably not smart, right? And so their legal department for the bank caught on pretty rapidly after the. The Memorial Day weekend was like, who's this random dude that said he wants to freeze the bank accounts? He's not on the bank accounts. He's not authorized on it. Activate the fraud protections of banks, right? And they hard freeze the accounts, but nobody tells me that. So basically a week goes by. So we're now in like June 5th time frame. And I get like, it's Monday morning. I think it was June 5th. Like, I start getting phone calls, like, our fuel bill. We have some tanks at the station where we filled the fire trucks. They were like, hey, we can't deliver your fuel because the building, you know, the invoice didn't go through. I'm like, okay. And then the utilities company and then the Internet company on, like, everybody called that first week of the month generally, you know, when all the bills would get paid. And so everybody's calling me as the chief and was like, oh, we're not getting paid. You're gonna have to shut off services and all this. And I'm like, sweet. So I inform him, the board president, and then I get a email on my personal email, and it's from another. This guy Allen, who's another one of the five musketeers in the story. And it's a pro se response to that court injunction that got filed because that's still sort of processing in the court system. And I'm like, immediately, I didn't even open it. I'm like, hey, man, I'm not party to this. Like, don't send it to me. And he fires back, oh, I've implicated you for felony charges. And I'm like, right. So I then I open it, and he's accusing me of committing some sort of, like, surveillance fraud or whatever for accessing the security system system of the fire station. I've never met anybody that's opposed to a security system unless you're doing something unsavory, right? And so he basically was like, well, he accessed this and turned it over, and so I want him charged. And I just kind of laughed it off, you know, like, whatever. But in my contract, there's an indemnification clause. So I, you know, I now have a board member accusing me of felony crimes for, you know, accessing and investigating election fraud. And so I. I tell the board president, like, hey, I need to invoke this clause. I need somebody to, you know, retain me an attorney or I'll do that. I just need the check for it. And they go, that goes in ignored. And so the next day, June 6, is the day all hell breaks loose. But that insurance thing that I had had him come in and sign, he never pays it. And so on June 6, 2023, the insurance company calls and like, hey, you know, we haven't received this $23,000 invoice to renew your insurance, so you're in danger of that being canceled. So I informed them, all hell breaks loose. And so again, through discovery, things are clear two and a half years later. So I can give you guys the time frames of that, but like, like at like 3:11pm is the notification of that. And so he says, hey, I'm sending you money for my personal bank account, $23,000 to pay this bill. And then at like 4:32pm he emails me and says, shut operations out of the fire district. You cannot respond to emergency calls. Which in my world is insanity. Like, what do you mean I can't answer a 911 call. And so I literally have to shut the fire department down. And what I didn't know at the time, that I know now, is he had already paid the bill an hour and a half prior. So in that hour And a half time span, the tactics changed a little bit. And so now they're shutting the fire department down. And they shut the fire department down for four days. And the news comes calling, all this stuff, right? He makes a public statement where he admits fault that he froze the bank account. The bank determined it was illegal. Bills didn't get paid. Right. Now, meanwhile, these folks had hired a new attorney to which they had cut off the access from me. And so as the fire chief, it's pretty normal for me to engage with and work through issues with the attorney to make sure we're doing things proper. They had cut me off from that. And so I'm kind of isolated on an island of trying to make the best decisions I can. So I had like a short news thing where I'm like, I just don't know what's going on. Yes, we had to shut down. This is what I know. And then I'm supposed to be on vacation for a week, spend time with my girls during summer. I do that before I even get through the week, man. I get a notification that I need to show up at a meeting on June 22, and I get the agenda and it says, evaluate my employment. It. We all know it's coming, right? So I go in, they rent a movie theater commercial, popcorn machine and lemonade dispensers like it's a party. And they try to humiliate me. And they blame me for the insurance not being paid.
