Ex-friend's emotional instability -acting compulsively

[axisdenied]

Greetings and salutations all. I have a personal concern that is taking up a lot of my attention, so I'll just skip the formalities and dive right in:

 

An ex-friend's behavior is prompting me to worry about the fact that he knows where I live. Long story short, we were pretty close for about a year before the relationship became unstable and I ended it after a semi-violent incident in which he pushed me to the ground during an argument. A month thereafter he moved away and I didn't hear from him for 9 months.

 

When he got back in touch, I reasoned that he'd had plenty of time to pull it together and that since he was more of a blast-from-the-past who now lived the next state over, it wouldn't hurt to go with it and respond with some friendly emails. The exchange quickly deteriorated into an obsessive pattern of him mailing everyday and calling every few days, contacting me to re-open the wounds in our sorted history and make it clear that he thought about me all the time and couldn't control it.

 

Despite my efforts to keep the exchange light, friendly and focused on the here and now, he persisted with attempts to open a dialogue about our past & former friendship. When I stopped obliging him in these conversations (citing that it was water under the bridge and I didn't care much to discuss it), he resorted to sending angry mails about what a horrible person I am & how much he 'hates' me (at one point referring to a desire to kill me), filled with ridiculous accusations and lines of questioning centered around what appears to be some rather delusional thinking -the idea that I am secretly in love with him but incapable of expressing it for god knows what reason. Nevermind the fact that we haven't seen each other in a year, we never dated, my sexual orientation excludes a preference for even dating his gender, and there is a history of violence toward me on his part.

 

Okay, I see that this has partially turned into a rant. I apologize. Back to the concern at hand: I stopped responding when it became clear that he was just seeking attention from me. I told him to stop contacting me and blocked him electronically. Since then he has phoned every night, leaving voicemails marked 'urgent' that sound like recordings of violent scenes in whatever movie he's watching at 3 in the morning. As you could imagine this behavior concerns me as I know he has the resources to come back to town whenever he wants, and he texted that it wouldn't stop unless I changed my phone number.

 

So . . . all of that said, what is a person to do? I know it is harassment, but law enforcement can't do anything about a simple concern over behavior that is taking place at a distance. I also don't want to inadvertently escalate the situation since I'm not sure to what degree he's lost it -compulsions to leave weird voicemails at 3 am do not automatically translate to an inevitable physical confrontation. My concern is based partially on these, the violent history, and the admitted desire to kill me. Not a whole lot of predictability there. Just to re-emphasize my line of questioning here,

 

1) Is this typical rebuffed behavior that has simply crossed over to expression? I mean, I've had the experience of being rejected with difficulty controlling my thoughts and feelings on the situation, but I've never compulsively expressed it. Mostly I want to know if my concern is legitimate.

 

2) Technical question -can specific numbers be blocked by the cell phone company?

 

3) Other than ignoring the behavior and contacting law enforcement when it seems warranted, is there anything else to be done?

 

Thank you for reading,

A