Norman Wicks - Norman Wicks Jr - Living in Buellton, CA

Norman Wicks ( aka normwicks) and his son Norman Wicks Jr., bring their charade to Buellton.  They have been living across from the McDonald's restaurant on 337 McMurray Road for over two weeks.  They like to set people and law enforcement officers up.  Once they attract their victims, they video record the incident and post selected portions on YouTube.  They tell everyone they are "handicapped".  Old man Wicks has slipped up.  In several of their YouTube videos, Norman Wicks senior can be seen walking through their motor home without the use of a wheelchair or crutches.  Photos are forthcoming that will show the two of them standing and walking around in between their van and motor home, using the opened, back doors of the van to try and block the view.  I'm also looking into the claim the Wickses make about having two "service dogs".  The dogs have been in public without proper handling and equipment. 

The Wickses are phoneys and opportunists.  They are bad actors abusing the system. 

http://www.oregonlive.com/special/series/dropouts.ssf?/news/oregonian/00/05/lc_51duin11.frame

A couple of the YouTube videos that showed Norman senior walking have been removed.  This one still remains.  You can see Norman walking @ 17:18 in this video.  Disabled my ass!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFE8EqCvCtM

To sneak up on the subject of this column -- the troubling, often disingenuous myth of the poster child -- I must first reintroduce you to the Wicks family, father and son.
Norman Wicks Sr. and his 23-year-old son are an uncomfortable pair. They live in the back of a '76 Chevy pickup and make a raucous living salvaging old computers. They aren't popular with the Portland police. They don't always play by the rules.
When I wrote about the Wickses' latest adventures last month, several callers suggested I take a closer look at the dirt beneath their fingernails. The restraining orders. The eviction notices. Their problems with women.
No poster children, these, I was told.
No kidding. They aren't cleanshaven. They don't have a clean slate. And for some purists, that justifies whatever ashes are heaped upon their heads.
There's a certain justice, I guess, and considerable applause from the pit, when bad things happen to bad eggs.
Our justice system was built, long ago, on the notion that we would punish people based on their unlawful conduct. The degree and severity of punishment would depend on the nature and extent of that unlawful conduct.
As we have become increasingly comfortable with extreme solutions to aberrant problems, however, the scales of blind justice are frequently tilted by fear and loathing.
Justin Thorp is one example. When the 16-year-old Thorp was sentenced, under Measure 11, to 75 months in prison for having sex initiated by his 13-year-old girlfriend, four of the nine judges on the Oregon Court of Appeals argued that the penalty was too excessive.
Immediately, two district attorneys -- Josh Marquis in Astoria and Terry Gustafson in Oregon City -- lunged forward in letters to The Oregonian to remind us that Thorp is no innocent, no star-crossed Romeo, no poster child. Much of the evidence they introduced would never have been ruled admissible in court.
Their reaction was understandable. They are prosecutors. But the vehemence of their rebuttal was a compelling argument that prosecutors shouldn't be the final arbiters in a courtroom, a role they so often serve under Measure 11.
Like Thorp, the Wickses are damaged goods. You'd expect any less from a couple of guys living in a truck? For the record, Wicks Sr. has seven felony convictions for burglary, theft and criminal mischief, the most recent in 1991. When they've been invited into homes on several occasions, eviction notices were required to get them out.
But as the Wickses' brush with Officer James Dakin last October made clear, you don't always get the whole story from police reports and the court record. If they are frequently in the thick of a dispute, Norman Wicks and his son insist they simply refuse to play the victim. If they show their teeth, it's because they swim with sharks.
"My whole life has been torment and pain," said the father, who has been badly abused and knows it. "I let people try to victimize me because now I can do something about it. I fight back. When they try to victimize us, we victimize them, instead."
Noble sentiments, those? Hardly . . . just the mirror image of the attitude many prosecutors and prison boosters bring to the dock.
The Multnomah County DA's office has, to its credit, abandoned its effort to prosecute the Wickses for tape-recording their October clash with police.
But I doubt this will be the last we hear of the pair. The Wickses are opportunists, square pegs, survivors who don't like being backed into a corner. They are a volatile mix of good intentions and bad instincts (or is it the other way around?)
They aren't children. They don't fit on a poster. Butter melts in their mouths. They aren't a good argument, the ideal Hollywood casting, for anything other than the fact that the issues we're still wrestling with in the realm of criminal justice are diabolically complex.
That the Wickses may make us uncomfortable shouldn't be a factor, much less the dominant factor, when the cops or DAs come courting.