Now, you’re federal inmates who compromised a witness protection case because you were too selfish and too careless to ask a simple question before selling my house. I stood up. I hope you use your time in prison to think about consequences.
Real consequences, not just what happens to you, but what could have happened to three innocent people because of your actions. Two years later, I received a letter from my mother. She’d been transferred to a minimum security facility in West Virginia.
The letter was eight pages of apologies, explanations, justifications. He missed me. He wanted to make things right.
She’d learned her lesson. I read it once, then filed it with the case documents. Deputy Chief Crawford found me in my office later that day.
Heard your mother reached out. She wants reconciliation. You going to give it to her?
I thought about Angela Moretti, who’d sent me a Christmas card last year with a photo of her kids. They were smiling. They were alive.
They were safe because I’d moved fast enough to get them out of that house. No, I said, I’m not. Family’s important, Mitchell.
So is doing your job right. So is protecting people who can’t protect themselves. So is maintaining boundaries with people who’ve proven they can’t be trusted.
Crawford nodded slowly. Fair enough. For what it’s worth, you handled this situation with more professionalism than I would have managed.
It wasn’t personal, sir. Wasn’t it? I met his gaze.
It was absolutely personal. But that doesn’t change the fact that they broke federal law and endangered federal witnesses. Personal feelings don’t override duty.
No, he agreed. They don’t. My parents were released from federal prison eighteen months ago.
Mom served her full sentence. Dad got out two months early for good behavior. They moved to Florida, away from the judgmental whispers of their Pennsylvania community.
They’ve written to me, periodically: cards on my birthday, emails on holidays. Each one asks for a chance to talk, to explain, to rebuild. I haven’t responded to any of them.
Maybe someday I will. Maybe someday enough time will pass that I can separate who they were from what they did. Maybe someday I’ll be able to sit across from them without seeing Angela Moretti’s terrified face when we evacuated the safe house.
But not today. Today, I have a job to do:
Witnesses to protect. Cases to build.
People who depend on the U.S. Marshal Service to keep them safe from the criminals who want them dead. And I can’t do that job if I’m wasting energy on family members who valued $850,000 more than they valued respecting my boundaries, my property, or the lives of three people they’d never met.
So, I keep working. I keep protecting witnesses. I keep maintaining the professional standards that my parents’ actions nearly destroyed.
And if that makes me cold, if that makes me unforgiving, if that makes me a bad daughter, I can live with that. Angela Moretti’s children are alive. That matters more than my parents’ feelings.
It always will.
