My son brought his boyfriend home for Sunday dinner, and the second I saw that young man’s face I went cold with a serving spoon still in my hand. Twenty minutes later I had locked him in my own basement and was calling the police — and I was wrong to do it, and I would do it again, and both of those are true.

The dispatcher asked me whether the person I had detained was free to leave, and I said no, and she said, “Ma’am, I need you to unlock that door.”

I said I would not.

She said it again. Very calmly. She said officers were on their way and that I needed to unlock the door and step away from it and that I could stay on the line.

And I said — and Elliot was standing four feet away hearing all of it — “His name is Emmett Rakes and he was taken out of Barrow Mills in 2013 and I am not opening this door until somebody is standing in this house.”

There was a pause on that line of about two seconds.

Then her voice changed and she said, “Stay on the line with me.”

Officers were there in nine minutes. Deputy Corliss Amara first, then a second unit, then, about forty minutes after that, a detective called Odalys Rincon who had driven from the county seat with a laptop on the passenger seat.