Huffington Magazine Issue 10 | Page 64

HUFFINGTON 08.19.12 TAMPA’S MAVERICK COP her grandmother’s house and asked for her. He thought she was staying there and hoped he could patch things up. He learned that she’d killed herself with an overdose of painkillers. Things disintegrated quickly after that. The grandmother took custody of the baby. Swiger got back into drugs, lost his job, his car, the apartment. He moved into a house with some crack addicts who let him crash on the couch on the condition that he would serve as “the muscle.” One night he woke to the sound of the dog going crazy. The house was on fire. He crawled out under a cloud of smoke and was sick for weeks. He has trouble explaining what happened next, but at some point during this period he broke off the last of his tenuous social connections and retreated into the woods. He knew some of the other men who lived in makeshift camps around Tampa, and he’d learned that they could haul in as much as 50 bucks a day just by standing Swiger works as he talks to Deputy Donaldson.