“Tow it. The registration is in my son’s name now.”
That was what the HOA president screamed at two of my own officers when they arrived at my house on a Saturday afternoon. The “it” was a 1968 Mustang fastback I had rebuilt with my late wife and my own son. The registration in her son’s name was a forged receipt she had notarized with a Cumming notary whose license had been revoked in 2022. The two officers, Sergeant Brennan and Officer Murchison, stood twenty feet from my open garage, waiting for me to identify myself. I was in jeans and a faded UGA cap. I removed the cap. I turned around. They snapped to attention and saluted. I had been the chief of their department for six years. The HOA president stood across the cul-de-sac with the forged receipt loose in her hand and watched her empire end in twenty seconds.
Cedarvale sits at the south end of Forsyth County, Georgia, about forty minutes north of Atlanta on a Saturday with no Falcons traffic. Twenty-five thousand people. Two stoplights you can name from memory. A police department of forty-one officers, fourteen patrol cars, one mounted unit, and a chief named Sterling Halloran who has been doing the job since 2018. That last one is me.
I came up through Atlanta PD in 1992. Six years on patrol in Zone 3. Moved to the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office in 2001. Made detective in 2006. Ran major crimes for nine years. Came to Cedarvale as deputy chief in 2015 and took the corner office in 2018 when Chief Easterling retired to a farm outside Calhoun. My wife Margaret passed away in 2019. Brain aneurysm. She was forty-seven. She was making coffee. She set the mug down. She sat at the kitchen table. She closed her eyes. She never opened them. The paramedics worked her for nineteen minutes. The neurosurgeon at North Fulton told me at three in the morning that there had been nothing for him to fix.