Just when it seemed we were through with criminal neighbor Mike McGarity, his niece, Kristen Milling, pipes up with a stream of nonsensical comments

Kristen and Chris Milling
(From facebook.com)

Carol and I were not happy campers when we were forced, via a wrongful foreclosure, to leave our home of 25 years in Birmingham and head for Missouri. At the time, our thought was, "If there is anything positive about this, at least we will be away from Mike McGarity, our criminally inclined neighbor, for a while."

Well, that hasn't turned out to be true. One of McGarity's relatives recently sent me three harassing e-mails. I thought, "My God, I'm roughly 550 miles away -- in another region of the country -- and members of this creepy family won't leave me alone. Are they the most intrusive clod heads in the history of the planet?"

The intruder, in this instance, was Kristen Lawrence Milling, who is Mike McGarity's niece. Specifically, she is the daughter of Nancy McGarity Lawrence, who lives in Homewood and is McGarity's sister. Kristen Milling, who appears to be in her late 20s, apparently came upon a post, "Here's the Story of Family Dysfunction Behind My Neighbor From Hell," which provided details about the criminal histories of Mike McGarity and his three brothers (two of whom are deceased -- Marshall McGarity via suicide and William McGarity via AIDS; Charles Alan McGarity, who has the longest and most serious rap sheet of all of them, still is upright and breathing.)

The post included references to Nancy McGarity Lawrence (Kristen Milling's mother) and the late Edmund C. McGarity (Kristen's grandfather and Mike McGarity's father). Kristen apparently took exception to that and decided to express her displeasure to me by firing off two comments to Legal Schnauzer in the middle of the night on July 17. (It actually was three comments, but one was just a repeat of another -- I assume sent by mistake.)

I obviously don't have a problem with comments. I've enabled the comment function on this blog from the moment it started 10 years ago. I also don't have a problem with comments that take me to task on some issue; I've run hundreds, probably thousands, of such comments over the years. If a comment is reasonably coherent, tasteful, and informed -- if it has any kind of relevant point -- it likely will get past the moderation process and appear on the blog.

Kristen Milling's missives, however, were a bit peculiar, even unsettling, although they appear at the post with a link above. She was unhappy with my work, but she also was way off base about certain relevant facts, so I thought the best thing was to provide my phone number and e-mail address and invite her to contact me to discuss things if she wanted to. I left it totally in her hands -- if she contacted me, fine; if not, fine.

When I posted the comments and my response that morning, her comments quickly disappeared. I guess she deleted them, which I didn't know a reader could do. She might have done it via Google+ -- and perhaps that is possible because my blog is Google based. I followed with a query about why she had taken the time to write the comments and then deleted them when they appeared. I also noted that her name still appeared as the sender, minus the comments, so I wasn't sure what the point was of deleting them.

Mike McGarity:
A criminal in the making

As the proprietor of this blog, it's my role to approve or delete comments, and I didn't much appreciate someone taking it upon themselves to delete comments on their own from my blog. My view is that a reader should not send a comment if she's not certain about her comfort level with it running. On the other hand, if someone has second thoughts about a comment and asks me to delete it, I almost certainly would agree to do that. But to have a reader circumvent my control of this blog -- something I've never experienced before -- well, I wasn't too happy with that.

I saved copies of Millings' comments from my e-mail and published them under my own name, so they would be on the post in perpetuity. Why did I do that? Her comments reflect a mindset that seems to be pervasive in the family of the man who started all of our legal woes and has caused us untold misery.

To be sure, Kristen Lawrence Milling is smarter and classier than her dumb-ass uncle, but that's not saying much. According to her LinkedIn page, she has a bachelor's degree (2011) and a master's degree (2012) from Auburn University, both in accounting. She is a certified public accountant and worked at RSM US LLC as a senior tax associate and currently works at Spire Energy (formerly Laclede Group) as senior asset management specialist.

Spire Energy is the parent company of Alabama Gas (Alagasco). Laclede Group purchased Alabama Gas in 2014.

According to her Facebook page, Kristen is married to Chris Milling, who is a risk analyst at Regions Bank.

Kristen Milling appears to have the trappings of a blessed life. But her words, via the comments sent to Legal Schnauzer, sound an awful lot like words I've heard from Mike McGarity's mouth. They also reflect a mindset that I've seen over and over in Mike McGarity's actions.

What were those words? We will take a look at them in an upcoming post.


(To be continued)