“Police would come but there was nothing they could do unless they could physically catch them” in the act, Ken said Feb. 19.

But thanks to a new city law, public works employees were able to board up the house at 14514 58th Drive NE. The law states that if neighbors complain the city can board up a house that does not have water, sewer or electricity for health and safety reasons.

If the weather had been nice, the Woods might have thrown a block party. But even though it was raining heavily neighbors still came out and talked under tree cover about how glad they are to have the drug house boarded up.

“It’s a yahoo moment,” Laura said, quietly clapping her hands together.

Another neighbor, Krystal Gronning, said the place was creepy. She said when her family moved there in December that she was warned that drugs were sold at that house.

She told her three kids they were not allowed to go near there.

“Don’t talk to them. It’s not safe,” she said she told them.

Gronning said she lived down the street from a drug house in Granite Falls, and hoped to get away from that when moving to Marysville. But this house was right across the street.

Gronning said other than hearing some yelling once in awhile, and people going there all hours of the night, the squatters who lived at the drug house didn’t bother her much.

“I keep to myself too,” she said.

The Woods lived even closer to the drug house.

“Our kitchen window overlooks their back yard,” Laura said. “We saw people come and go all hours of the night.”

Her husband added: “They’re like cockroaches when we turn off the lights. Vagrants would come out of the woods.”

Ken said he knew the elderly couple that used to live there, but the husband died and wife left when a bunch of “riff-raff kids moved in.”

He said crime then began to increase in the neighborhood. Cars would be driven into the backyard and stripped. Also in the backyard were piles of garbage in plastic bags.

“There’s an epidemic of drugs now,” Ken said.