How well do you know your neighbors?

So...my next door neighbors are seemingly normal people. They're on the quite side, keep to themselves mostly. They are from Vietnam and have 3 kids. The oldest girl, Mi (5) and her younger brother Khoa (sp?) (3) often hang out with me in the yard when I'm doing yard work or just hanging out on the porch. Mi is cute, but somewhat bratty and hard to manage and Khoa is adorable and very sweet. They also just had baby girl a few months back, also named Mi or so Mi (the oldest one says). I don't know why they named both daughters the same??

Anyway, the parents as I mentioned are pretty quiet. Even when the kids are out with me, they just sort of watch from the house and don't really talk much. They'll say hi and wave if they see us coming or going, but that is about it.

Several weeks ago, the husband put a sign up stating that they were selling all their landscaping. They have big fountain and pond thing in their back yard. Lots of stone and wood as well as trees and plants and such. We didn't think much of it at that time. We also noticed that they started moving a few weekends ago, but their house is not for sale (I'll come back to this in a minute).

Our downstairs neighbors have had issues with them because they leave their garbage can to the side of their deck and then just throw stuff over the deck. Sometimes they miss and don't bother to pick it up right away and sometimes they forget to take it out to the alley so it will start to stink and I don't know what they eat, but their trash is horrendous smelling. We don't notice it so much in our part of the house, but the downstairs neighbors notice it more as the garbage can is right outside their window. They talked directly to the neighbor's about it several times, but they never did anything about it so they filed a complaint with the city and the city came by and fined them and made them put it out in the alley where it belongs. It stayed there for a few days, but ultimately they brought it back to the deck only this time they left it on the other side of the deck. Even though it was further away from the downstairs windows it was still stinky so the downstairs neighbors complained again. Again the city came and forced them to keep it in the alley.

In addition to the garbage issue, the female, the Mom, wife, etc. cannot park to save her life. She always had one tire up on the curb and is diagonally facing out to the street with half her car on the lawn and half in the street. One day we saw a police car in front of their house and an officer walking up to their door and we thought maybe he was going to ticket her for her crappy parking job so we chuckled about it a little and went on our merry way. Then a day or two later, we saw another police car and another officer approach their door. These aren't just ordinary police either, these are sheriff cars so we figured it had to do with something other than her parking skills. Then we thought, maybe their house was being foreclosed on. That would make sense as to why to they're selling stuff and moving out without a for sale sign or anything.

Come to find out...

Our other next door neighbor to the East was reading in the local paper (sort of like the Davis County Clipper) an article that just happened to be about the neighbors to the West of us. She shared the news with the downstairs neighbor who then relayed it to us...I know it's very gossipy, but I bet you want to know what the article said too, right?

Well, the woman is an Accountant/CPA and apparently she has stolen nearly 2 million dollars in tax returns. I guess she had the returns direct deposited into their bank accounts as opposed to the rightful tax payers? Anyway, she plead guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 4 years in the Illinois State Penn. The husband hasn't been charged yet, but is under investigation to see if he was involved in anyway. Crazy!!

I feel bad for the kids. They do have some Grandparents in the area so perhaps they'll go live with them especially if the husband gets convicted as well. It's funny, I always a weird vibe towards them, but I thought it was just because they kept so quiet and I thought maybe (especially the wife) didn't speak much English and that's why she didn't talk much, but turns out she's a crook!

Their house is really nice, we'll have watch for it in the Government Auction section of the paper and see how cheap we could buy it for. Though its well over a million dollar home so I'm sure even at an auction price we couldn't afford it. Oh well!