My Neighbor The Stalker
(January 15, 2002, Eugene, OR, by Staff)
A local man was arrested Tuesday on charges that he stalked his 21 year old neighbor for over 3 years. Vern Halbot was taken into custody after Police wrestled Vern to the ground and kneeled on his neck to keep him from escaping. “It was pretty hairy at first,” Officer Davis told reporters, “Mr. Halbot opened the door in his bathrobe when we served our arrest warrant this morning at 4:27am. Officer Zonski knocked on the front door and yelled, ‘Chinese Food!’.” Officer Davis then paused a moment to collect himself, obviously shaken from reliving the experience for reporters. Then Davis continued, “So after about 4 minutes the living room light comes on and Mr. Halbot opens the front door. Zonski and myself are the first through the door. Zonski hit Halbot low and I hit him high. Zonski doesn’t mind grabbing guys down by their crotches, whereas I prefer not to touch other men’s genitalia.” At that point in the briefing Officer Zonski took the podium to confirm that he indeed enjoyed touching other men in the lower extremities. Officer Davis then retook the podium and continued with the harrowing story of serving this high-risk arrest warrant. “So the perp went down like a sack of potatoes and was screaming ‘I give up, I give up’ the whole time. That’s when our training kicked in and we rolled him to his stomach and Zonski sat on the perp’s legs and used his face to keep the perp’s buttocks from escaping. I knelt down with one knee in the perp’s back and one on his neck to keep him at bay long enough for us to cuff him.”
For the last three years Vern Halbot had been stalking his neighbor, Stacey Fox, on a daily basis. Stacey explained through streams of tears the life of fear she was living. “In the fall, I would go outside to hang up laundry on the wash line, and there he would be… in his backyard raking leaves.” Stacey then went on to describe how it didn’t end there, “I would wake up in the morning and look out my window into his kitchen and there he would be making breakfast, at night before I would go to sleep I would look out my bedroom window and into through his window and there he would be, sleeping in his bed. It was eerie.”
At Mr. Halbot’s arraignment in the 4th district court later that day, Judge Lansing refused to set bail for Halbot on the grounds that “Mr. Halbot, you are one sick fuck and no bail for you!”
