@QUEENEGREENE - I am so sorry to hear that. I know firsthand how devastating that can be. My heart goes out to all involved.

Secondly, I wanted to drop a note to apologize to all of you for being so distant and less actively involved in conversations here than usual the last couple of months, but things have been really stressful and chaotic at the homefront here. We're having near daily struggles and battles with my girlfriend's 16-yr old son.

He is special needs and apparently no consequences nor punishments will deter him from breaking basic rules of the household...really just basic rules of decency. He lies to us, steals from us, and won't follow his punishment long enough to get off of it. He's been grounded to his bedroom for over a month now. We've had to remove every electronic device that accesses the internet and take it to our workplace for storage. The TV is locked so he can't view it. I have to unplug the router daily and take it to work with me. We've had to put chains & locks on closet doors to keep him out. We are about at our wit's end here. We have been searching and begging for help and it's not coming fast enough. The confrontations keep getting uglier and uglier. We have to sleep with our phones, wallets & keys in our pillowcases at night because he comes in our room at night while we sleep to try to take them and play on them or steal from them. We put a keyed doorknob on our bedroom door, but it doesn't stop him from prying it open daily. And we don't want to shut it at night because then we won't get any A/C in our room. After warning him multiple times that were were going to call the cops on him, we finally had to make good on the promise after he stole her credit card that she had just replaced from the last time he took it and used it without permission. He was unsuccessful in charging any money to it this time at least. But even that middle of the night visit from the cops has not changed his behavior one bit in the last week. We woke up to him digging around in his mother's nightstand drawer for her wallet again yesterday morning! He previously took the credit cards to purchase in-game currency for games he's downloaded on his phone or x-box. But with all of those devices and game systems gone out of the apartment, now he just steals cash to buy pop from the vending machine down the hall. It's petty theft at best, but it's very troubling and worrisome that he can't control his impulses!

He has an in-home therapist coming twice a week for 2 hrs each and also goes to group therapy for 5 hours on 4 days per week. It is not helping in the least. We're prisoners in our own home. We started keeping an "incident log" about 6 weeks ago and it's already up to 9 pages long! We can't straight out legally kick him out until he's 18 (about 13 more months) but what we really want is to get him the RIGHT help or he's definitely going to have problems as an adult and just end up in jail.

Sorry to dump all that but I really needed to vent some frustration.
Dave