Not the best of nights last night.
I have a scheduled appointment to show one of my vacant houses to a potential tenant this evening, so last night I drove over to the house to make sure everything was in order for the showing.
When I arrived at the house the first thing I noticed was that both of my "for rent" signs were gone. This didn't really set off an alarm bells for me because I thought either the city had removed them because I put them in the devil strip or some kids had stolen them. At any rate no big deal.
When I pulled into the driveway though my perspective changed. The driveway for the house is in the rear and when I pulled into the driveway I noticed the back door was open. Then for the briefest of moments I saw someone walking through the house. Honestly my first thought was not that it was a burglar, it was that someone who wanted to rent the place had found a way inside and was looking around.
I walked up to the back door and opened it up and yelled "hello". No answer. Now I knew for a fact I saw someone inside the house and when they didn't answer I knew something was wrong.
I walked through the house yelling hello and I saw a figure dash from the kitchen to the stairs and run up the stairs. They moved so quickly and it was somewhat dark inside so the only thing I could really tell was that it was a person. Now this is where my stupid genes kick in. I followed them up the stairs. I was yelling hello over and over again. I got to the top of the stairs and the figure dashed into the bathroom upstairs. At this point I started thinking "what if there is more than one, what if they are armed" etc. etc. I ran down the stairs and outside to my truck to call the police.
I got on the phone with 911 and started circling the house. I explained what was going on and that I believed the intruder was still in the house upstairs. The police were quickly dispatched. The first officer on the scene went to the rear of the house w/pistol drawn and asked me to stand out front while we waited for other officers to arrive. Within maybe 3 minutes four other officers were on the scene with the house surrounded. A few minutes later two more officers came and while the others guarded the exterior these two went inside to locate the intruder.
About 10 minutes pass and they both come outside to say they found nobody inside! I'm like WTF there is someone in there. So I go in the house w/the officers and show them where I saw the intruder. I was baffled because clearly there was nobody in the house. While we were inside another officer came in to say that they had found a witness and this witness provided a description of the intruder. About 3 cars immediately started scanning the neighborhood. I'm not kidding when I say literally 5 minutes later one of the cars returned with the intruders in the back of his car.
They caught them! AND as I feared it wasn't just 1 person in the house. In fact it wasn't just 2! It was a total of 3 of them in there! AND they were 13-14 year old kids......
After some Q&A with them it seems that one of them the day before had managed to break off the side door knob that had the lock box on it. He then took the lock box home and spent all day yesterday beating it open to get the key. It just so happened that I arrived just a few moments after they initially entered the house.
So the officer says "you have two options, 1. I can take them home to their parents or 2. We can fill out an incident report and take them downtown." I asked the officer what he thought would be the best course and he replied "I don't know, it's a tough decision". It was then that another officer walked over and said "hey I was just at your neighbors house the other day, he had someone who broke into his garage and stole an axe". Well it didn't take a genious to figure out that it was highly likely these kids broke into that garage and used that axe on my door.
Given this newest piece of information I decided to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. We filled out the incident report and the police hauled them downtown for processing. I'm not sure what is going to happen from here but I'm hoping I have a chance to confront those kids and their parents in court.
I'll also mention that these kids are extraordinarily lucky that I had left my house without my pistol. If I had my gun with me when I went into the house things would have very likely turned out much differently.
The end of the story as of now was that I was at this house until about midnight replacing the broken lock and re-keying the remainder of the doors.
