After growing up in Lincoln, Travis moved to Arizona for 15 years. In 2017 he was looking for a transition to a job or business opportunity that would fulfill him. As part of this transition, Travis returned to Lincoln and stayed with his brother and sister-in-law while he decided what his next move would be. He had no intention of staying in Nebraska.
But then we met. He didn’t immediately decide to stay in Nebraska but after several months he conceded to the idea of hanging around to see what came of our relationship. I’d say he made a pretty great choice.
The living arrangements at his brother’s were becoming… awkward but he wanted to maintain his flexibility for job changes so we decided it would be best for him to move in with me. This was in July 2018. Based upon some circumstances which had transpired while Travis lived with his brother, I told Travis it really seems like your brother is using drugs. Travis disagreed at first.
The relationship between Travis and his brother continued to decline. Odd activity had been going on through his brother’s mobile audio business, and then one day his brother called Travis asking him for a ride to urgent care. When Travis picked up his brother, his brother was complaining of having things crawling under his skin. His brother would send videos to his family of the same thing, he would record his skin to “show” these things crawling under his skin. But nothing could be seen in the videos.
And then the absurd accusations began. His brother had video cameras in and around their home since he would stay at his mobile audio shop overnight. His brother had taken a clip of video where he believed he could see Travis in the video in the middle of the night. We couldn’t see anyone in this clip after watching and re-watching it at length, and Travis had been in bed with me the entire night.
His brother called Travis irate about this perceived betrayal. I even tried to reason with him that Travis had truly been home the entire night and whatever he was seeing in the video did not involve Travis. There was no reasoning to be had, and it was very apparent in this conversation his brother was not of sound mind.
And then there were the odd phone issues. His brother text Travis about the iCloud account message Travis had supposedly sent. His brother also accused Travis of having surveillance on Travis’s brother’s phone. His brother claimed there was an email address he believed to be Travis’s that had been monitoring his phone in some way. The email address he sent to Travis connected to this surveillance was not Travis’s email address even though it did have ‘travis’ in the email address. Whatever odd activity that was happening on his brother’s phone had nothing to do with Travis. Again, Travis doesn’t even reset the modem and router when the internet goes down. Surveilling someone’s phone was way beyond Travis’s technological skill set. But we didn’t realize at the time something needed to be done about the odd activity happening on Travis’s device. He wrote it off as just another strange or delusional situation connected to his brother’s life.
Travis attempted to get his brother into rehab through a solo intervention, and his brother refused. Unfortunately, this was the beginning of the end of their relationship. Travis’s brother began having legal issues with county criminal court cases. Travis would show up at his brother’s court dates in support of him, but his brother would fail to appear.
Customers of the mobile audio business began posting publicly about how his brother was taking their equipment and money but not installing or completing the jobs the customers had paid for. Eventually his brother was evicted from the mobile audio business by the landlord due to unpaid rent. Before the eviction, the cameras at the mobile audio business caught some interesting activity: someone was “watching” the activity at the shop (it looked like an undercover narcotics agent). After Travis’s brother had been evicted from the building, his brother was on camera breaking back into the building, carrying out large bags, and leaving behind holes in the wall and ceiling. No charges came from any of this activity. In the drug world, there are ways to make charges go away. Let’s just say a tip from an FBI confidential informant led to the biggest drug bust I made while working as a probation officer.
Things between Travis and his brother were very complicated to say the least, and threats were the very last straw. Travis’s brother made threats on Travis’s life on two separate occasions. Travis had called the cops to make a report. Both times, when the cops arrived they claimed they could not take any action. Despite the fact the threats by Travis’s brother were in first person ownership, the police said since he had not communicated the specific action he was going to take (i.e. I am coming to your house with a gun to kill you) they could not do anything. These details seem really important since the local police would not protect Travis, yet the federal system was taking action and prosecuting Travis for much less. Travis never retaliated or threatened his brother and continued attempting to help him consolidate debt to get his brother in a better financial place.
However, with all of the chaos and heartache of watching his brother fade into this lifestyle, Travis chose to sever the relationship. It was not what Travis desired for his relationship with his brother, but it was what he believed to be best. This decision was especially hard for Travis as he had been faced with making the same decision with his biological father in his childhood, and family is very important to Travis. No relationship with his biological father. No relationship with his brother.
At the time I was looking at the evidence of Travis’s case in June 2022, his brother had felony possession charges pending in court. His brother changed phone numbers like he changed his underwear making it possible he was also changing devices regularly or owning multiple devices as well. The pieces of this puzzle with the multiple devices, email address, IG account, family dynamics, personal character, criminal history, and threatening behavior were not painting a picture of Travis being behind the crime he was being charged.
In the months while Travis’s case was pending sentencing, his sister-in-law (his brother’s wife) admitted she had been controlling his brother’s phone through an iCloud account. What precluded her from also having controlled Travis’s phone or accounts?
It’s difficult to conceive and accept betrayal by family at what could potentially be this level. Surely there was a way to get the defense attorney or the prosecution to see what I was seeing. So I thought.
Lesson learned: Take action immediately on any bizarre tech activity on your phone, email, social media accounts and not just financial accounts.
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Peace & Love,
Janessa
You can’t reason with some unfortunately! So very disappointing! Pray everyday for his brothers healing but he’s got to want it!