We'd worked the same corridor of East Texas co-ops together in 2018, a rate manipulation case that ended with a cooperative manager losing both his job and his pension. Tom didn't trade favors.
He traded evidence, which was better.
"Tom, I've got a residential disconnection with zero prior notice, no legitimate safety finding, and a field report filed on a day when nobody set foot on my property. This is exactly the kind of case we used to open files on."
He didn't hesitate.
"Send me everything you have. I'll flag it for formal inquiry and request a litigation hold on all related records."
Five business days later, the co-op's response arrived in a brown envelope that smelled like toner and poor judgment. I cleared the kitchen table, set down a fresh cup of coffee, and read every page twice.
The house was quiet, just the tick of the wall clock and the low hum of the Generac outside. The disconnection order was signed by Dale Pritchard, senior operations manager, Lone Star Electric Co-op.
The last name hit me before the title did. Pritchard.
Tammy Pritchard's brother-in-law. The attached field inspection report was signed by Clint Avery, field technician level three.
It described a hazardous wiring condition presenting immediate safety risk to adjacent residential structures, dated July 14th. I checked one thing.
It took 45 seconds and blew the entire operation apart. Lone Star's internal leave calendar, obtained through my PUC request, showed Clint Avery on approved vacation from July 12th through the 18th, seven consecutive days.
I pulled up his Instagram public profile. On July 14th, the exact day he supposedly inspected my property and filed a report recommending emergency disconnection, Clint Avery was standing on a fishing pier at South Padre Island holding a red drum the size of a toddler, geotagged, timestamped 2:17 p.m. His wife commented underneath, "Best catch of the trip."
The man who condemned my house was 400 miles away catching fish in the Gulf of Mexico. I set the papers down and let the weight of it settle into my chest.
This wasn't a clerical error. This wasn't negligence.
This was a coordinated fabrication between two people who thought nobody would check. Dale Pritchard created a fake safety report, attached a technician's name without that technician's knowledge or consent, used it to authorize an unlawful disconnection of residential power, and he did it because his sister-in-law, the HOA president who'd been trying to force me out for 2 months, asked him to pick up the phone and make it happen.
Under the Texas Utilities Code Section 39.002, that's utility fraud. Under federal law, because Lone Star receives funding through the USDA Rural Utilities Service, it's wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. Section 1343, punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison.
I opened the Pritchard folder on my laptop, poured a fresh cup of coffee, and started building a timeline that would end careers. For the first time since Katherine died, I felt the old engine turning over inside my chest.
Not anger, precision. Over the next 2 weeks, I turned my garage into a command center and my house into a fortress.
First priority, make sure Tammy could never threaten Lily's safety again. I ordered two Tesla Powerwall units, 13.5 kilowatt-hours each, 27 kilowatt-hours total.
Combined with the Generac, my house could now run fully independent of the grid for 72 hours, longer if I managed the load carefully. I did the installation myself, bolted the units to the garage wall, wired them into the panel through a gateway controller, and programmed the system to switch over in 6 seconds flat if grid power dropped.
The whole setup cost $11,000 in parts. I saved another $8,000 in labor.
When you've spent your career inspecting other people's electrical work, you tend to trust your own hands. I mounted four Ring Floodlight cameras, one on each face of the house: front porch, back patio, south driveway, north fence line.
continuous recording with 60-day cloud backup, motion-activated floodlights that would turn my yard into a stadium at the first sign of movement after dark. If Tammy stepped on my property to measure a blade of grass, I'd have it in high definition from two angles with a timestamp spotlight.
Then I started the paperwork that would actually end this. I filed a formal docket complaint with the Texas Public Utility Commission.