Updated at 3 p.m. Saturday to reflect that Box was back in custody by Friday night.

There is a bogeyman haunting the streets of Oak Lawn.

He has been there, on and off, for years. Arrested over and over; charged some two dozen times; incarcerated, too, often in state jail but occasionally in county lockup or the city's drunk tank. His crimes, those to which he has pleaded guilty, have ranged from trespassing at the neighborhood Kroger and stealing vodka from an Oak Lawn Avenue liquor store to meth possession and spitting at a cop and threatening a couple with a broken bottle.

A longtime bar owner along Cedar Springs Road used to decorate his windows with the man's always-growing rap sheet. In the middle of a weekday afternoon, patrons at neighborhood bars can be overheard talking about him, cursing his name, sharing could-be tall tales about his doings, asking one another if "hey, you seen that S.O.B. lately?"

His name is Timothy Box. He is 40 years old, and, according to lawyers who have prosecuted and defended him, he is homeless and mentally ill. He is what people worry about when they talk about a shrinking police force and a spiking homeless population filled with the mentally ill in desperate need of treatment.

Box disappears for long stretches, during which time the neighborhood breathes a deep sigh of relief, reveling in the relative peace and quiet accompanying his blessed absence. But then he will reappear, as he did two weeks ago after he was cut loose from the Holliday Unit in Huntsville, and the disquiet returns. The fear, too. And the anger.

No one in a neighborhood already on edge can understand how such a troublemaker could be allowed to roam free.

That outrage has been on full public display on the Facebook page for Take Back Oak Lawn, the group that sprung up in the wake of the neighborhood assaults that began in the fall of 2015 and continued well into last year and remain frustratingly, infuriatingly unsolved. In recent days the page's administrators, as well as a Change.org petition, have posted warnings to residents and patrons accompanied by numerous photos of Box's return to Cedar Springs.

In one he can be seen being subdued by firefighters at the station across from the Melrose Hotel after, police say, he shouted drunken threats at the public servants. In another he's sitting on the hood of a Dallas police car. I heard from several people Wednesday that he mooned the officers around the time the second photo was taken.

Lee Daugherty, who, for 12 years, has owned Alexandre's on Cedar Springs Road and now spends his free time tracking the movements of Timothy Box (Robert Wilonsky / Staff)

Each post has generated lengthy comment threads whose tones vacillate between exasperation and fury. Some people say they've seen him recently harassing patrons in parking lots; others suggest violence might be the only way to get him gone for good. Fliers decorated with Box's mugshots have been passed out along Cedar Springs, warning patrons and employees to use caution and dial 911 if they see him coming.

Lee Daugherty, the 37-year-old owner of the Cedar Springs bar Alexandre's and one of the voices behind the Take Back Oak Lawn account, said Wednesday that no one's out to harm Box. After all, the president of the Stonewall Democrats of Dallas said as we sat at his bar, "Everyone on the internet talks tough." But he's also not about to sit back and let one man terrorize his neighborhood, either, especially when one of his own — 27-year-old bartender Jarret Duke — bears scars from a horrific beating he received in an unsolved August 2015 assault on a walk home from work.

"Here," Daugherty said, "we defend our own."

That attitude is understandable, defensible: The neighborhood, long the heart and soul of Dallas' gay community, has yet to see a single person prosecuted for the robberies, assaults and outright gay-bashings that took place in 2015 and '16.

"We don't want to encourage vigilante behavior," said Rafael McDonnell, spokesman for the Resource Center in the heart of the neighborhood. He, too, helps administer the Take Back Oak Lawn Facebook account. "But people are frustrated — frustrated there wasn't closure," McDonnell said, referring to the unsolved assaults.

"The Tim Box situation is one piece of the grander story," McDonnell said, "but it's the story of the people of Oak Lawn, who live there and eat there and work there and are dealing with this every day."

The flier that has been passed out to bars and businesses along Cedar Springs Road

McDonnell asked if I thought dozens of assaults in Lakewood or Preston Hollow would have gone unsolved almost two years later. Probably not.

Both men sympathize with the cops, whose ranks shrink as veteran officers seek better-paying jobs and pensions that aren't on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. They know all about how the city's shoving beloved neighborhood patrol officers into the City Hall basement to work the dangerously understaffed 911 call intake center.

And they know theirs is not the only part of town bearing the brunt of a surging homeless population. At least here there are no tent cities.

They get it. Doesn't mean they have to like it.

The Dallas County district attorney's office said this week it's clear Box suffers from mental illness, and that "because he's spent so much time in jail, our office even took an alternative approach to addressing his criminal behavior ... by requiring treatment." But he refused the help — "noncompliance," in the technical parlance of Brittany Dunn, spokeswoman for Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson.

So, instead, he was incarcerated, again and again, over and over.

"Because his offenses tend to be low-level (generally misdemeanors), he serves relatively short amounts of time (as allowed by law), is released and again commits nuisance crimes frequently participated in by the homeless/mentally ill population," Dunn said via email.

1 / 2Timothy Box was subdued by Dallas Fire-Rescue workers in front of the Cedar Springs station on April 15.((Courtesy Lee Daugherty / Take Back Oak Lawn)) 2 / 2Another photo of Box taken the same day as the run-in at the fire station((Courtesy Lee Daugherty / Take Back Oak Lawn))

Dallas police, of course, know all about Box, who was last arrested for public intoxication on April 15 for that dust-up at the fire station — then cut loose a few hours later, after he'd sobered up. Police, too, say that Box is a "nuisance," an aggressive panhandler. Sgt. David Davis at the Northwest Patrol Division, which keeps watch over Oak Lawn, said two cops assigned to Cedar Springs for more than a decade "have encountered him for as long as they've been on the beat."

This week, Dallas police met with Daugherty and McDonnell at the Resource Center — to "calm their fears" about Box, said Davis said, "and defuse any angst."

Needless to say, it didn't take.

Box wasn't out and about Wednesday; word was he'd been assaulted himself behind the Valero and landed in the hospital. That doesn't come as a surprise to the court-appointed attorney who defended him in 2014, when he was charged with spitting at a cop. After all, said Lisa DeWitt, "Mentally ill defendants are as likely to be victims of crime as they are criminals."

But Friday, just before 10 a.m., Daugherty got word through the Facebook account that Box was at the Walgreen's. When I last talked to Daugherty, he was headed out the door to find the bogeyman.

By that night, Box was back in Lew Sterrett Justice Center being held on several charges — among them criminal mischief and resisting arrest.