This American Life - 430: Very Tough Love

Broadcast on: 25 Mar 2011

Glindsey Dills is 24. She's from a place in southern Georgia called Glen County, right on the coast. Nears Big Town is a partly gentrified, mostly impoverished city called Brunswick, population 16,000. They were interviewed in a prison, a way of state. Okay, I'm Lindsay Dills. This is Lee Arendelle State Prison. Before all this, I was, I'm actually was all state for soccer five years in a row. I was expected to have a scholarship to college. A couple of scouts had contacted my dad my coach at my school. But in her sophomore year of high school, Lindsay started smoking pot. She began working at this bar and restaurant Spankys as a waitress, ran with an older crowd that she met at the restaurant. By senior year, she was doing coke in a pretty serious way. She had a 21-year-old boyfriend, which at the time, she thought was the coolest thing ever, then as she sees that one differently. Finally, senior year, she quit soccer, which of course her dad and every other adult in her life tried to talk her out of. The coaches were calling the house, telling my dad we please talk to her. And probably part of it was part of the drugs. And I think part of it was that I just had done it for so long. And I wanted to be, I wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to go do stuff on the weekends. And I wanted to not have practice at five o'clock in the morning. And I didn't want to have to run three miles every other day. And she says in retrospect, she knows she wasn't coping well. Her home life had been pretty rough when she was little, before and after her parents split up. And now she was self mutilating, cutting herself with a razor, smoking a lot of pot. Her parents tried to do the right thing and get a treatment for all that. She went into a program for a week or so, more than once. But here's where things took an unusual turn for Lindsey. October 2004, she was 17, her dad was out of town, and she forged two checks, one for $40, one for $60, and her dad's checking account. Cashed him in her job, spent some of the money on drugs. Well, he comes back from out of town and he does his balances checkbook. He's a CPA, so he's on it. Like as soon as he gets home, he knows that something's not adding up. And I don't, I don't in a million years blame my dad for doing what he did. He was terrified. All he'd heard was horror stories about what happens to people when they were doing drugs. He didn't mess with drugs. My dad doesn't drink. In the 24 years, I've been alive. I've never seen my dad drink alcohol. I've never heard my dad curse. She says he started randomly taking her to be drug tested. I told her that if she failed a drug test, then you go to the police about the two forged checks. Lindsay figured out ways to pass a test, get somebody else's pee or dilute her own, but finally she fails a test, and her dad followed her own his threat. Two police officers come into my job and they're, you know, they're like, "We're looking for Lindsey Dales." I was like, "Let me get her for you." And I'm about to, you know, just like leave. So I know exactly what's going on at this point when they say we're looking for Lindsey Dales. I was like, "Oh my God, he actually did it." I never thought he would do it. So I'm arrested at this point. They, you know, slam me over the host to stand. I'm at the front of the restaurant. People are turning around. I'm mortified. I'm like 18, and everybody is just like, "Oh shit." Because they know how my dad is. My dad used to call spankies to see if I had left work. He'd be like, "Is Lindsey there?" Because I would be like, "Oh, I'm working late." The sheriff's in there. He's one of the regulars at the bar, and the sheriff standing there like, "Oh my God." Because you know the sheriff, because you've waited on him. Right. I know the sheriff, and then there's a bond salesman there that I'm, he's a regular. Him and the sheriff are real good friends. And so he finds out what my bond is, and he's gonna bond me out, because he's familiar with

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