Tami and I first became friends in late 2001. Truth be told, I needed friends. That was about the time that Elciem and I needed a new start. We hit it off immediately. She has a flambouyant personality that mixed well with my more subdued (particularly at the time - given my mood) manner. Through her I met a host of other people and found myself in a circle of friends.

There was Dre, Jason, Robbie, Carl and Martin, a friend of Jason's that was on probation at Texas Tech. Martin would often bring his little brother Dave and when he got back in to Tech, we kind of inhereted Dave into our circle, to some of our chagrin.

The group was cool, but Tami was by far my best friend from the group. I helped her wade through her problematic relationship with Robbie and she was good at keeping me upbeat during a period of great confusion in my life. If you'd have asked me then, I'd have told you that Tami was a treasure and not only the best friend a guy could ask for, but one of the best people I'd ever met.

The story really begins on Memorial weekend in 2002 when we were all going to go see "Sum of all Fears", but unfortunately one by one we all had to back out. I was moving into my current complex and had fallen behind on that. Jason's parents dragged him on a vacation and Dre got an opportunity to go to San Padre. I can't remember Robbie's reason offhand, but it wasn't unreasonable.

I'd gone to work early when Tami called me in hysterics. Wanting to make the best of a bad situation, she ended up going out with Dave that night to see the movie. They ended up drinking some liquor in his car in the park. He was pouring and she wasn't paying attention.

Tami has always had a good alcohol tolerance level, so she was surprised when a couple shots of vodka started taking a pretty serious toll. She asked Dave to pull over so she could vomit. He pulled in to the nearest parking lot and got out to help her get out of the car to vomit. When she finished he gave her a soft drink and they sat there for a bit while she cleaned her mouth out. The vomit had taken its toll on her physically, so when he pushed her into the back seat and jumped on top of her, she blacked out.

She woke up in torn clothing on the staircase of her apartment with bruised wrists.

Let me tell you a couple things about Dave. We never really cared much for him and only really brought him in cause of Martin. I'm not sure what Dave's medical condition is, but he kinda jerks around a lot and very often will mutter incomprehensible things under his breath without any context. His mutterances were usually cuss words and often violent in nature.

Let me tell you something about Tami: she made it all up. She physically hurt herself (although not severely) tore her clothing to give herself credibility. I would find out several months later why she did it: She was mad at us for cancelling and wanted us to feel guilty.

It worked because we all felt absolutely terrible for leaving her along with Dave. The phrase "shoulda known better" popped in and out of our minds in self-defeating cycles.

And, of course, there was Dave. She chose her mark very well. Dave did seem like the kind of person who wasn't in control of himself. We didn't like him and the story and his behavior didn't seem too far out of character.

Tami didn't want to go to the police because she "blamed herself", "was asking for it" and a ton of other things that would make us jump to her own defense and tell her what a great person she is.

Perhaps that should have been a tip-off that something was wrong. But the thing about Tami is that she was the type of person that would never lie. She was a tell-it-like-it-is kinda person and yet would never hurt a soul. It was no contest as to who we should believe.

Tension and anger ran so high that a couple of our friends jumped Dave and gave him a very severe beating. I was not a part of that group, but I knew they were going to do it and I didn't try to stop them. It was, in my mind, the least that Dave deserved.

As time passed, her story and recollection of the events starting having holes. With time and distance, we had time to more logically consider her version of the events and some of them were downright weird (she only added the "he gave me coke" part of the story when Jason commented that it was weird that Dave'd stick his mouth all over someone who undoubtedly reaked of vomit smell) and the part about leaving her on her staircase was a bit odd because that didn't sound like Dave.

It's embarassing that it took me as long as it did to start puncturing holes in her story, but I was more-or-less of the mind that women don't lie about that sort of thing - at least not without a serious motive (a broken heart or money) which was never present. Even once I knew for certain that she made it up, I was so uncomfortable in believing that she would do that that I'd have found any way to deny it if I could have.

But I couldn't. Others, strangely, chose to continue to believe despite the mountain of evidence.

The lies continued from there and got worse and worse. Eventually she crossed one too many people and she ended up leaving Houston. Once she got out of Houston, the lies magnified. She had a LiveJournal that I'd read on occasion. It was one thing after another. Her father died (he didn't), she got cancer (she didn't), her family has this dark, abusive history (I saw no sign of it), and one thing after another when she kept winning friends by way of sympathy and pity because life was just so difficult for her.

Via LiveJournal, I watched an entire new batch of people believe all of her lies. She was doing the same things in San Antonio that she did in Houston, only more frequently and with the exception of crying rape, more substantial lies. She eventually got a boyfriend out there who fell for it hook-line-and-sinker.

What's striking to me is not only how grossly immoral it all was, but also how incredibly stupid. Did she really think that her boyfriend wouldn't find out that her father was still alive? That she never had cancer? Did she think she could do the same things to people there that she did here with different results?

But the biggest problem is indeed the moral one. She was inventing situations to garner sympathy, love, and gifts. She found peoples' weak points (such as our protective instincts) and exploited them to make us feel bad for cancelling and give her the status of "ultimate victim."

When I think of the five times in my life that I've been the most angry, she has to be the only one of them that has two slots dedicated to her. Words can't describe how angry I was at the rape - nor my anger that she made it all up cause she was hurt that we had other things to do on Memorial Day.

She was discovered again in San Antonio. From what I understand, she was dumped a couple days before she did it. My opinion of her is such that I wonder if she just did it to teach her ex-boyfriend a lesson.