One of the may task taken on by the locksmith professionals working here at Los Angeles Locksmith is a sheriff supervised eviction, these types of jobs usually go off without a hitch with most of the tenants already being vacated before the eviction takes place requiring our technicians to simply unlock the doors and change the locks turning the property over to the rightful owners. But in some cases the tenant has not followed court orders and vacated the premises and upon arrival there is a dispute between the person living in the home and the person there to take it away. In these cases it can get quite ugly, with crying babies and small children being forced to leave the only place they knew to be their home or like in this case violence erupts.
The story comes from Nebraska; Lancaster County to be exact where John Firestine of Husker Lock and Key was called upon to be the locksmith on site while the eviction took place.Firestine said he was behind the deputy when he heard the him yell, “Doug, put your gun down!” Then the man opened fire toward the doorway. Thankfully the bullets missed both Firestine and the sheriff but the return fire from the deputy’s gun did ultimately end Mr. DaMoude’s life after being taken to the hospital.
When people think of a locksmith’s job they do not often associate it with being in constant danger, and this is true it is not every call that we respond to that put our technicians in a life or death type situation but there are many of the call we receive that are less than desirable and just like every other field of service you never know what is going to happen when people are placed in stressful situations.
Although evictions can be one of the easiest jobs to perform when there is no one on the premises, it takes a much different turn when the sheriff knocks at the door and there is an answer. Another risky service call we take is the emergency lock out, sure most of the time it is a stranded customer desperately trying to get back inside of their home or vehicle but on the rare occasion we have run into a disgruntled employee trying to gain access to their old place of business, a heartbroken ex girl friend or boy friend trying to get into the apartment that was once theirs and the sneaky thieve who is trying to steal vehicles by claiming to be locked out. This is why our Los Angeles locksmith technicians are trained to always ask for proof of ownership before letting anyone enter the previously locked space they have just opened up.
In addition to verifying that the person requesting the service is the rightful owner of the place we are opening, we also train our employees to never chase after a customer who refuses to pay. Instead we are trained to return to our mobile service units and call the police who will track down the customer and make them pay. It is easy enough when you unlock a home or office to sit there and wait seeing how the customer will need to return at some point but when it comes to automotive locksmith service it can be much more difficult seeing how the person might be locked out in a completely different part of town than they live. This is why upon arrival to all of our service calls the technicians are required to take down the full address and the license plate number of all customers and keep it in their log book just in case there is ever an issue with payment. If you have heard about the tragedies out of Atlanta where a locksmith had responded to a emergency lock out call and after unlocking the customers vehicle the customer took off with out paying so the locksmith gave chase and lost control of his vehicle crashing into 3 young girls walking down the street and ended up killing 2 of them. All of this could have been avoided had the locksmith just followed procedure and took the customers information along with plate number before performing any work.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families affected by these tragedies and hope that by informing others of the safe common sense practices that our Los Angeles Locksmiths follow will help to avoid any more of these types of incidents from occurring ever again.
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