Thursday, Sept. 21, 2006 | 7:27 a.m.
Adam is a slender 10-year-old, tall for his age - and he is scared.
People are following him, videotaping him.
On Saturday, a man videotaped Adam as he left his house to go to a soccer game. He and his mother scurried to their SUV. The man with the camera laughed.
As they sped down the road, Adam asked his mother: "Do you think they are still watching us?"
This has been Adam's life for the past several weeks, and his mother, embattled Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald, is angry.
"I'm fair game," she said in an interview at her campaign headquarters. "But when you terrorize my children, that's another story."
Boggs McDonald is fighting off accusations that she does not live in her district - an accusation that, if true, could get her kicked off the November ballot.
The allegation comes in a lawsuit filed by the Police Protective Association, the union that represents rank-and-file Las Vegas Metro Police officers, and the Culinary Union, which has had a long-running feud with Boggs McDonald, a former Station Casinos board member. Station Casinos employees are not unionized.
The unions, which hired a private eye to investigate Boggs McDonald's residency, say they have amassed about six weeks' worth of video that shows the District F commissioner picking up the newspaper, hauling garbage cans to the curb in her robe, spending the night and having a nanny care for her children - all at a home outside the district, not the one she named on her election filings.
And on Wednesday a new allegation surfaced: a claim that Boggs McDonald has used campaign dollars to pay the nanny.
While her 2-year-old daughter is young enough that she is not likely to remember or understand the controversy, her son is another story.
Several days ago he asked her: "Do you think they've gotten me when I got out of the bathtub?"
Her son's knowledge that police officers are behind the videotaping has altered his attitude toward law enforcement, she said.
"For my son, it's gone from 'the police are our friends' to 'the police are bad,' " Boggs McDonald said. "When he sees a police car, he has a fearful response. As the mother of a young black male, that is not healthy."
Boggs McDonald isn't talking about the charges. In fact, she agreed to an interview only under the condition that no questions about her residency be asked. Her attorney said she spends time at both homes and that the allegations are a mere political ploy.
The commissioner is, however, talking about her two children - and in no uncertain terms.
Last week, she cornered Commissioner Tom Collins in the hallway of the County Government Center downtown.
Collins, the 270-pound former rodeo cowboy, is also head of the state Democratic Party. He has sent out press releases criticizing his Republican colleague and raising suspicions about a proposed midcensus redistricting plan that Boggs McDonald has pushed. The plan would place the home now outside her district within it.
When Collins told her that they should go horseback riding on his ranch to relax, she gave him an earful that included several four-letter words and probably caused the 6-foot-3 Collins to hold onto his straw cowboy hat.
"I had to let Tom Collins know it's not OK to go after my kids, and there will be hell to pay when he does," she said. "I didn't mean it as a threat. I don't threaten people. I tell people what will be."
Most commissioners on the seven-member panel have expressed disappointment about Collins bringing - from their perspective - politics and divisiveness into the commission chambers. Since the exit of four commissioners who have been convicted or pleaded guilty in a federal corruption case, the new commissioners have prided themselves on their unity and cohesion.
Collins, however, has no plans to back down.
"She should know that there will be no limits in this campaign," he said.
The residency challenge has opened up a host of issues for Boggs McDonald, including a nasty divorce in which her husband, Steven McDonald, claimed the couple is incompatible due to his wife's "deceit, being consumed and corrupted by politics, making the achievement of political power and position her priority in life over that of her family and children."
In his divorce complaint filed in June, Boggs McDonald's husband also touched on the residency issue, asking a judge for "exclusive possession of the marital residence" - the home outside Boggs McDonald's district.
He should get the home, he contended in the suit, because his wife "has a secondary residence at 6386 Grays River Court, where she stays on an infrequent basis with her personal assistant." The Grays River home is the one Boggs McDonald listed on her election filings.
Her attorney says it sounds like Boggs McDonald's husband is working with her political enemies.
Calls to the attorney for Boggs McDonald's husband produced a written statement in which he denied involvement with the unions or Boggs McDonald's opponent in the November election, Democrat and School Board trustee Susan Brager.
"Steven would like to be able to raise his children in a stable home and to teach them proper values," the statement said. "He would like to limit the exposure his children have to the political world. Steven and Lynette's son was recently scared by people following him when he is with Lynette."
When news of the divorce filing hit Tuesday, Boggs McDonald said she had no choice but to tell her son about the things he might hear at school.
"Your natural instinct is you want to protect your children," she said, holding back tears. "But I had to prepare him for the day he might have."
She said the entire experience has been amplified greatly by her own past.
A former Miss Oregon who competed in the 1989 Miss America Pageant, Boggs McDonald became an object of obsession for a stalker who sent her demented letters for years.
"He sent letters to me in Oregon, Texas and here. I went to the FBI to see what they could do," she said.
"The FBI had a wire on my phone to try to catch him," she said. During her unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2002, Boggs McDonald said, security personnel at Mandalay Bay were put on high alert during a campaign event because of concerns about the stalker.
Eventually the FBI nabbed him in Atlanta, she said.
"I went from trying to overcome that to this current situation," she said.
Still, she said, she plans to run a tough campaign, highlighting shortcomings in Brager's record as a School Board trustee and telling people what she has done for the district.
"I believe I've done a great job, but at the end of the day, it's not life and death," she said. "You have to keep it balanced. That's why I'm still smiling."
The Greenspun Corp. and members of the Greenspun family, owners of the Sun, contributed $11,000 to Boggs McDonald's campaign. A Greenspun business also donated $2,000 to Brager's campaign.
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