Before we knew that the young man who lived behind our home was apparently murdered, weird vibes wafted through my back yard, which directly links to the possible location of a homicide.  It’s maybe a week or just short of a week when Tyler Hanks met his untimely death.

Hand watering my back yard last Thursday afternoon was uncomfortable.  I’m posting photos of my yard because I designed it as a small square of peace and reflection.  It’s a place where my senior-citizen cat can lounge in a tiny patch of grass, watch the birds he once loved to hunt, all while I observe hummingbirds feed near the mermaid sculpture that dominates the garden’s theme—a seaside garden.

When the house behind us is silent—that means no arguing voices, no thumping bass speakers, no hash pipe smoke gusting over the fence—it indicates the family-dysfunctional is either in jail, visiting folks elsewhere or…

This time it was the “or…”

Our hot tub is near the back fence and a necessary part of my life.  I love rising just before dawn and to soak in the steaming, bubbling water while I meditate on the stars, the silence, and the beauty that surround us.  Sometimes I turn off the jets and listen to the ocean waves crash against the nearby beach.  Lucky sunrise soaks bring me early morning owls, falling stars, and extraordinary moments of awareness.

But last Friday morning I meandered my way through the early dawn hours to the tub, opened the lid, and twisted my nose in disgust.  The tub’s water, that never, ever smells bad, was vile.  I returned upstairs and whined to spouse—aka the hot tub healer.

I was grumpy too.  Full of bad vibes—not my modus operandi for the sacred hours before the sun peeks above the Santa Lucia Mountains.

Saturday morning’s berry vine plucking also turned negative.  It seemed like my flesh was continually jabbed by the vine’s razor sharp thorns.  And when I heard whispered chatter from the other side of the fence,  I suddenly and quietly tiptoed through my garden.  The whispers spooked me.

As reported in my last blog, all hell broke loose Sunday morning.  Thru late last night (Tuesday), a constant stream of investigators took charge of this hopeless dive of a house wrapped in yellow crime scene tape.  The psyche drain from this endless parade of men and women combing thru the tweaker piles of trash and garbage seeking clues, and maybe a murder weapon, is evident today by the dark circles under my eyes.  The commotion riled the ghost of Tyler Hanks.  One could sense his anguished ghost wondering why someone ripped his life  from him.

The local paper headlined the apparent homicide.  It quoted persons who knew the 20-year-old murder victim depicted as, “… a very kind person…he took care of the family…he was a polite young man…”  He, according to the news reports, helped a recent Friends of the Library fundraiser but that “…his life just kept getting in the way.”

A serendipitous visit to a new county morgue yesterday introduced me to a reporter who was on the homicide scene.  I asked the reporter, “Is the inside of the house better or worse than the outside, which is framed in trash?” The reporter replied, “I’ve never seen anything like it.  I was absolutely awful and vile.”

This tells me more about how this family lived and the cause and/or effect of possible mental health issues, drug and alcohol abuse, and an untimely slaughter of someone who might have broke out of his karmic imprisonment from his own flesh and blood.

This morning we woke up to the normal neighborhood sounds of folks walking their dogs, trash pick up trucks, chattering birds, and the house behind us was void of yellow crime scene tape.  The command station vehicles, mobile crime lab units, official vans and sheriff vehicles have left with their evidence.

To date, there’s no official public report as to how Tyler Hanks died, who did it, or where or when it happened.

This scenario angers me from so many different angles—of which, I’ll explore in the next blog.