She Called the Quiet Courthouse Volunteer a Thief — Then He Held Up a Slip With Her Own Handwriting on It
"Thief — that is my exhibit!" she shouted down the fifth-floor hallway, and forty phones came up.
Dale Orton is sixty-two, unpaid, and stamps courthouse files four mornings a week. One complaint from Noreen Mabey and he loses the badge his late father's courthouse friends pinned on him.
She said he lifted exhibit 412 off her cart. He said nothing at all, which the hallway read as guilt.
He had already stamped and shelved her exhibit that morning — 9:04 a.m., logged in his own slow hand — while she was still standing at the scanner queue.
Noreen is the third volunteer she has "caught" this year. The other two quit in the same week, both in tears, both with the same clipped voice still ringing in the hallway.
She said the slip he held up was forged. She said it loudly, twice, for the phones.
Then Judge Abel Reyes looked at the top-left margin of that slip and stopped talking — because he had seen those two initials before, on two other complaints, in the same tilted hand.
Noreen's mouth opened. She said the initials were not hers.
The office door behind the bronze grill opened, and the panel chair asked her to step inside.
Why did she empty the scanner queue every afternoon at 4:40? Who signed the register for her nephew's office? The full account — the exhibit sticker, the corkboard notice, the name on that evening's log — is in the blog below.
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