Financial assets connected to Palmetto and the fraudulent vendor structure were used in part for restitution. The money had flowed through affiliated vendors, through consulting fees moved between companies with overlapping addresses, through a vendor that belonged to Grant Mercer's brother in law, through a payment stream that ran through a property management company associated with Grant's wife Victoria. It had been millions in security assessments, collected from residents who believed they were paying for protection, and some of it came back. Not all of it. Money like that never all comes back. But part of it came back, and it went to the people it had been taken from, which was the closest thing to justice the financial side of the case could offer.
Families pursued separate wrongful death and civil rights claims. Each family had its own lawyer, its own facts, its own version of what had happened to Harold Benton, or Louise Parker, or Clifford Ames, or Barbara Wynn, or Samuel Pope, or Margaret Dillon. Some of those claims were strong. Some were weaker, because the medical records were incomplete, or the witnesses were gone, or the paperwork barely mentioned security personnel at all. That unevenness was painful, and it was honest. The law does not distribute justice evenly when the evidence itself was unevenly preserved, and part of what made Palmetto's conduct so damaging was that it had created the very gaps that later made accountability difficult.
Residents unlawfully restrained or injured reached settlements or judgments depending on their evidence. A man who had been handcuffed at a gate, with photographs and a citation and a neighbor who saw it, had a different case than a woman who had been threatened in her driveway with nobody else present and no paper trail. That was not fair in any cosmic sense. It was the legal system working with what it had, and sometimes what it had was enough, and sometimes it was not, and the lawyers who took those cases had to tell their clients the truth about which kind they had.
Denise and I received compensation related to the assault and unlawful entry at our home. The baton to my shoulder. The Taser probes along my side. The four men who drove a golf cart onto my property and told me I was under HOA arrest, which was not a real thing, and then proved they were willing to use force to pretend that it was. The compensation did not undo any of that. It did not unbruise my shoulder. It did not unmake the morning Kayla came running across the yard and stopped herself before she hit my injured shoulder, hugging me carefully, asking me if it was over, and hearing me tell her no, that what came next was evidence, and charges, and trials, and answers.
We kept some of the compensation. We were not saints, and we were not going to pretend otherwise. We had medical costs, and a house to maintain, and a granddaughter to help raise, and retirement was supposed to be ordinary, not expensive in the way a federal case makes ordinary life expensive.
We used a larger portion for something Natalie would have understood immediately.
We created the Natalie Avery Civil Justice Center.
Natalie was our only daughter. She died three years earlier of ovarian cancer at thirty seven. She taught eighth grade art. She painted murals. She bought supplies with her own money and kept snacks in a bottom drawer for children who pretended not to be hungry. Her crooked ceramic bowls still sat on our kitchen windowsill. Kayla laughed exactly like her mother, which was both a comfort and a small daily heartbreak, and I thought about Natalie constantly during the case, not because she had anything to do with Palmetto, but because she had been the kind of person who noticed when somebody smaller than her was being treated unfairly, and who did something about it without making a speech about it.
The Center offered free initial consultations for Florida residents dealing with police impersonation, abusive private security, unlawful HOA enforcement, or questionable residential detentions. Four categories, because those were the four shapes Palmetto's conduct had taken, and because we had learned, painfully, that most people who experienced those things had nowhere to go and no idea whether what happened to them was even illegal.
The Center was staffed by lawyers, retired investigators, civil rights specialists, and former prosecutors. People capable of saying more than "that sounds terrible." That phrase mattered to us, because "that sounds terrible" was what most people said to Walter Turner, and to Raymond Ellis, and to the twelve residents in my first folder, and to the twenty one more who came after, and it was not nothing, sympathy is not nothing, but sympathy does not file a complaint, and sympathy does not subpoena a contract, and sympathy does not tell a frightened resident whether the badge in front of them means anything at all.