Do you have a Case Number? I start there because it’s the cleanest fact in a messy story. Report a theft, a number exists. Walk into a station, a record exists. Even if nothing comes of it, the system leaves a trace. Case numbers are how events become real inside institutions. They are how memories become a record, how a claim becomes something that can be checked.
Without that trace, everything else floats.
An elderly couple, from Minnesota, couldn’t get a trace about their claim: sixty ounces of gold. Coins kept in a safe at their son’s home in the Boise area. Police opened the safe. Afterward, the gold was gone.
The simplicity of that sequence matters. Not accusation. Not motive. Access, then absence. A locked container opened by police. Property no longer present. That is the entire claim.
They were on the phone with a friend. Their son, and his wife weren’t on the call; both were behind bars in Idaho, and their five children had been swept into the system. Everyone was scrambling to keep the family intact. The phone call moved between logistics, fear, and triage, not storytelling.
Her credibility, on this point, came from her restraint. Jan wouldn’t claim she saw police take it. Jan wouldn’t claim she could prove who did. Jan kept it narrow: the safe was opened; the coins were gone. Access, then absence. That’s the line she held.
That restraint shaped the entire conversation. She was not asking for conclusions. She was asking for a process. For something written down. For a starting point.
Contact with Ada County did not start with a desk visit. It started with a dispatcher and callbacks. Jan remembered asking if they should come in and file something written. She remembered being told it wasn’t necessary and that everything could be handled by phone. Calls came at bad moments: FedEx, the airport, loud announcements overhead. Jan kept a phone number, not the deputy’s name; everything stayed verbal and rushed.
Verbal systems fail quietly. They leave no residue.
So I listened for the obvious follow-up. Did they get a report number?
“No,” Jan said. “We got nothing.”
That “nothing” mattered more than the gold at first, because it was the part that should be easiest to settle. People misremember. People compress events. A number either exists or it doesn’t. If it exists, it can be requested. If it doesn’t, that absence itself is a fact.
After contacting Ada County, they were directed to Boise Police. Jan described a quiet lobby late in the day, empty chairs, no one else around. An officer stood with a small pad and wrote while they spoke. Jan said he restated their words in ways that changed the meaning. When Jan and Rudy corrected him, his tone sharpened.
That detail lingered. Not because it proved anything, but because it signaled a divergence between what was being said and what was being recorded.
Then they asked for documentation, a report, evidence they came in to report the missing property.
“You’re not going to get one,” Jan recalled the officer telling them.
An innocent explanation was possible: a policy requiring a records request; an officer who doesn’t hand out paperwork at intake; a report filed later; a misunderstanding about what “documentation” meant at that moment. The friend on the call treated the refusal as a signal, not a mistake.
That reaction did not come from paranoia. It came from experience. From knowing that disputes often turn not on what happened, but on what exists in writing.
Jan held the point: if Boise Police opened the safe, who investigated Boise Police? Jan was told Boise internal affairs. Police investigating police. Standard in the abstract, suffocating in this context.
Internal processes are designed for order, not reassurance. They make sense structurally, but they offer little comfort to someone trying to preserve a fragile record while events are unfolding quickly.
The friend urged them to record every conversation, take notes, and assume, based on prior experience of others, that the official record would not protect them. He sounded like someone trying to build a case from fragments—dates, names, what was said, what never got written down—because later disputes would hinge on those scraps.
The call shifted away from the gold, because the gold was not the only thing missing.
Jan and Rudy were in Idaho because their grandchildren were taken into state custody. Their youngest son and his wife are in jail, facing charges tied to sealed court orders and to communications they believed were protected—petitions and notices meant to challenge the same government bodies holding them. Their five kids were abruptly moved into the welfare system and placed in a group home.
Nothing about that process felt gradual. It felt sudden and total. Family structures were replaced by institutional ones almost overnight.
Jan and Rudy described a push to keep siblings together and the practical problem of finding a licensed home that could take five children at once.
They went through classes, background checks, fingerprinting, and long interviews. “We’re the foster parents of our grandchildren,” Jan said.
The phrasing carried weight. It was factual, not indignant. A statement of status, not a protest.
Their daughter was in the home too, part of what Jan described as a three-person foster arrangement. The children were back in the house and starting school.
Stability had been rebuilt, but only by accepting a framework imposed from outside the family.
The friend pressed the authority question. Why did grandparents have to become foster parents to care for their own biological grandchildren? Who decided earlier written arrangements with friends were invalid? Jan didn’t offer a name. Jan didn’t know which employee made that call. Jan knew the department required the foster route, and the family complied because the alternative was losing the kids.
Compliance became survival.
What kept pulling me back wasn’t the most dramatic claim. It was the smallest one: no paper trail. If the family was wrong, a case number would clarify it. If the family was right, a case number would protect them. Either way, the absence left them stuck with memory, argument, and no paper trail.
The call ended with an officer trying to reach them again. Jan wanted to call back quickly before the person went off duty. Another brief window. Another chance to get something into writing.
And the question remains: do you have a case number?
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