Okay, this is a follow-up thread about having been burglarized -- many years ago.
My three kids were still really young (7, 6, and 3) when we had an intruder during the wee hours of a Sunday morning.
At about 3:00 a.m., our household was fast asleep when I thought that I heard our elderly dog come up the stairs. I was about 90% asleep or I would have realized that she was blocked by baby gates, because of her old age, from going up and down the stairs at will. (Another long story.) However, in my sleep stupor, my brain went back to the days when my dog had full access to the house and the stairs.
As I pulled my covers back up, my husband suddenly sat bolt upright, and said, "WHOA!!!" I mumbled, and muttered, and asked what was wrong. He said, "Someone is in the house!!!"
I mumbled, "No it was just Amanda coming up the stairs."
My husband was already out of the bed by now, and was headed for the bedroom door. He said, "No, someone is in the house! Check on the kids." With that, he headed down the stairs, in hot pursuit.
I thought, in my half-sleep, that he was being an idiot, but nevertheless got myself out of bed, and went down the hall to check on the kids. It was obvious, at this point, that the dog hadn't come upstairs (even though I had distinctly heard very clear footsteps), but I thought that perhaps a child had gotten up to use the bathroom, or that there was some other explanation for what I had heard, and for what had prompted my husband to leap out of bed!
I checked each of the other three bedrooms, and all three kids were out cold. It was obvious from their deep sleeps that no one had been up anytime within the past few minutes. As I headed back towards our bedroom, my husband called up to me from downstairs and said, "Call 911 -- someone has definitely been inside the house!!!"
What he had discovered downstairs (and, by the way, the police officers who arrived later on scolded my husband for having ventured downstairs in the first place), was that a majorly heavy pane of glass from our sunroom door had been removed from its frame (don't even ask how because even the police officers couldn't figure out how it had been accomplished in the way that it had been), and set carefully INSIDE our sunroom. The burglar had then stepped silently inside our house.
Backtrack:
We had an unusual set of circumstances leading up to this which only served to convince us that the neighborhood had been cased.
As I said, it was the wee hours of Sunday morning. Our usual practice was that my husband always retrieves the first section of the Sunday newspaper from our driveway on Saturday night. He didn't do that on this particular evening because he wasn't feeling well, and had gone to bed unusually early.
Our front porch lights had gone out a day or two before, and we hadn't replaced the bulbs yet because they are a pain to replace. It involves pulling out the darned ladder... In addition to that, and by coincidence, our back light had gone out too. AND -- so had our next-door neighbor's back light!!!
So... the backs of two houses next to each other were unusually very dark, and our front was dark... Additionally, our inside lights had been turned out several hours earlier than normal because my night-owl husband had gone to bed many hours earlier than normal, and our newspaper was uncharacteristically still at the end of our driveway. Someone who was familiar with the rhythms of our street CLEARLY thought that our house was empty...!!!
Well, it wasn't.
Fast-forward back to the intruder:
My husband discovered that the back door was without its pane, and understood that someone had come in that way. It's a HEAVY piece of glass, so it was amazing that this person was able to remove it from its frame, without making a sound, and set it gently INSIDE the house without dropping it, or making any noise whatsover.
Our elderly dog had begun sleeping in our power room, probably because the powder room is a small, dark space, and felt denlike to her. Well...the burglar apparently went through the kitchen, and headed down our front hall towards the front stairs. I guess that he must have noticed our dog sleeping in the powder room because he closed the door so that she couldn't get out. Poor dog. She was becoming deaf, so she probably never even knew that he was there!
At any rate, he had to leap/step over a baby gate at that point, because we had blocked that part of the hall so that Amanda didn't have easy access to the stairs. (Her hip dysplasia had become worse, and she was also quite feeble...)
As my husband returned to our bedroom, I was already on the phone with 911. The dispatcher told me to wake our kids, and to bring them into the bedroom with us. We were to lock our bedroom door, and to stay on the line with the 911 operator until told to hand up. This was because they had no way of knowing whether or not the burglar had left the house!
So, we quickly grabbed up the kids, tucked them into our bed, and waited for further instructions. It was really funny, in a way, because the 911 operator was really rattled herself! It turned out that our county hadn't had a breaking-and-entering like ours, especially in our area, for...well...they couldn't remember when! Just my luck...
Anyway, we were all five of us locked in our master bedroom as the operator kept us informed of what was happening. "The officers are on their way"... "The officers are pulling up in front of your house"... "The officers are about to enter your house"...
FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE!!! THIS IS THE FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE!!!
At that point, my oldest daughter woke up, and asked in a shaky voice, "Mommy... Who's that voice?"
We explained that it was the good guys, but she wasn't sure that she believed us.
It turns out that Fairfax County had sent SIX units to our house, one of which was a canine unit. SIX freakin' police cars parked outside our house...
Our next-door-neighbors (the ones with the back lights out) had been awaked by all of the activity outside, and had glimpsed the police dog while watching out their front windows. We were told the next morning (because we never saw the dog ourselves) that this particular police dog was the size of a bear!!! We DID hear it sniff at our bedroom door, as the officers took it through our house, room by room, and as we all remained huddled in the master bedroom. They took it down to the basement too, and yelled once again: FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE!!!
My oldest daughter started to cry...
Well, the guy was long gone; he had leaped over all of our random baby gates during his escape. (He was probably really, really sorry that he had picked our "empty" house with the obstacle course!)
We got our kids settled back into their own beds as the police officers were dusting everything for fingerprints, but my husband and I could never quite get back to sleep again. Consequently, we sat up for the remainder of the night. (Just so you'll know -- the stuff that they use to dust for fingerprints doesn't come up very easily. It SMEARS when you try to clean it. What begins as a 1-inch dusted area turns into about a 12-inch blackened area when you wipe it with either a damp or a dry cloth. NASTY!!!) They never caught the guy.
Our neighbors told us the next day, when they described the size of the police dog, that they had heard a police officer in our backyard (through which the intruder escaped) yell that familiar old, "FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE!!!" According to our neighbors, hearing that scared the **** out of them because they thought the intruder had been cornered, and that gun fire was about to follow...
It turns out that my husband had also heard the sounds of someone/something on our stairs just as I had, but apparently had been slightly more awake than I had been in that moment. While I was focused on getting back into a deeper sleep, my husband had actually opened his eyes. That's when he had seen the figure of a man standing in our bedroom doorway, shining a flashlight into our bedroom.
I thank God every day that my husband wasn't out of town on that occasion (this was during a period when he used to have some job-related travel) because I don't even want to THINK about what might have happened to me, and/or to my children if my husband hadn't been there at the time!
For about two years afterwards, I tried to "suck it up", and be a brave mommy whenever my husband had to go out of town, but it didn't work out very well. I always decided that my kids and I needed to have a "special sleepover" in the master bedroom when my husband was gone. I would pile the three of them into the king-sized bed while I locked the bedroom door, and slept on the floor next to it. I had my telephone next to me, and my stungun in hand! (My mother-in-law had given me one years earlier...)
After about two years of this, and as the kids got older and bigger, I decided that I couldn't take it anymore, and that it was time to get an alarm. Since then, good old Brinks has given me great peace of mind!!!
Did I mention that my house was burglarized when I was seven years old, and that I had stayed home from school sick on that particular day??? NO??? Did I mention that I was the only eye witness to the burglar himself??? NO??? Did I mention that the next year, at the age of eight years old, I had to go to court to testify (and identify) against the intruder??? NO???
Yeah...
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
Thank goodness your husband was alert enough to realize what was going on. I can not imagine how terrifying it must have been to go through such an awful experience, but thank goodness that it did not end-up worse than it did, even though having an intruder inside of the house is horrific.
Your story has definitely got me to thinking that it may be time to invest in an alarm system for my house. I had one installed about 15 years ago. It had a motion detector in the living room and kitchen area. Unfortunately Dutchess used to like to hop up on the kitchen chairs, and even though they swore that they had set it to only go off after sensing a certain size, which they assured me a dachshund would not set off, it was forever going off.
The police department in my town threatened to start fining me for all the false alarms at my house, so I basically discontinued the service. It was ADT.
Tess is a very alert girl, who basically barks at the wind. While she would not hurt a fly, she is quite a ferocious looking girl, and a German Shepard to boot. Any time a stranger comes out to the house, not including my friends and family, on a service call, or to deliver something, I tell them that I have to put her into another room, so that she will not bite them...... I am paranoid that someone will come back to rob me, and being a single woman on my own, I really can't be to careful. I still have the ADT control panel on the wall in the kitchen, along with the stickers on the windows.
I will add making a call to an alarm system one of my to-do's for next week. Thanks for sharing the story, and reminding us that you really can not be to careful.
well that was a scary story, I guess I'm glad I'm a light sleeper, although I don't know what I would do exactly. I should get a baseball bat or something to keep on hand.
wow, thanks for telling me your story. I get freaked out all the time because Vinnie is either out of town or working nights so he isnt here anyways. And it stinks because we live in military housing so we cant put an alarm in. Argh.. Anyways, the good thing is that the street we live on has a house at the end of it which the police of Groton use as a policing house of some sort. So I think that helps deter things a little. That and thankfully none of my neighbors know me well enough to know that my husband is never home. Anyways, my husband has me keep a pistol in the nightstand next to the bed. Problem is that its on the other side of the bed that I usually sleep on. I guess I better start sleeping on the other side. Ugh. I dont even know if the thing is loaded anyways, but it does help my peace of mind to know its there.
Thanks for the story, Moore. I can certainly understand your paranoia and nervousness. We've had a few scares in this place but have luckily so far not been robbed. But in the old house, where the kids grew up, an old three storey high on a hill, at the end of a cul du sac, there were all sorts of strange goings-on. The old lady across the street had a squatter living in her basement for a whole summer before our kids discovered him and of course we called the police.
The house directly across from ours had been burglarized several times - nobody ever stayed in that place for more than two years, so we called it the "curse house". Every marriage broke up, kids went astray, fortunes lost....bad vibe house.
Recently I drove down that old street and was shocked to see the state of our beloved old home. The young couple whose father had bought the house from us as a wedding present (he was an Egyptian anasthesiologist) had let the place fall apart! The hostas I had planted around the big oak in the front had gone wild and the rockery alongside the front walk was a total mess. Shutters were broken, paint peeled, and the living room was painted orange! It looked like a grow-op tenement. Even the old dry stone walls we had restored were crumbling down and the only way that could have happened was through bashing and water erosion. Ugh. No burglar in his right mind would bother trying to break into that place!
For security, I have my doggies and stickers on a few windows indicating an alarm system that the woman we bought this palce from had put up. She took the system with her and left the stickers. Works for us!
KaeEll, we have a "bad vibe" house in our neighborhood too. Among the three owners, the original couple had to sell it for financial reasons, and the next two sets of owners got divorced...
Shelly, my husband was a champion skeet shooter when he was growing up, and learned to handle guns of all sorts along the way. We NEVER had ANY guns in my childhood household, and so I know absolutely nothing about them! In fact, they terrify me, and I had never even HELD one until just a few years ago when my father-in-law passed away, and we were disposing of his household. I hated the way it felt in my hand, and immediately gave it back to my husband. The irony is that I THINK I would probably be pretty good at hitting my intended target because I tend to have a good eye for that sort of thing.
My husband has taken all three of our kids to the shooting range just so they'll know what guns are all about. However, we don't have any handguns here at home with the exception of an antique military issue handgun that belonged to my husband's grandfather. I'm sure that it won't shoot right now, and I doubt that we have any ammunition for it anyway!
I'm afraid, if I had a gun (assuming that I learned to handle one) that any intruder would see me reaching for it, in my half-sleep, and would then use it on me! My other fear is that I would be disoriented, being awakened in the middle of the night, and end up shooting someone I love...
I think that I'll just rely on other means of protection!!! I'm not competent enough to own a handgun.
Tess, Dutchess is beautiful... Thank you for posting her picture.
We hardly ever use the motion sensor feature with our alarm unless we're actually going out of town, and the dog is boarded. We use Brinks, but Brinks and ADT are fairly similar, and competitive in their prices. It really isn't all that expensive, and it's worth the peace of mind. For me it is, anyway. I honestly don't think that I could live in a house that didn't have an alarm system now. I've already had TWO too many household intruders in my lifetime, and I don't care to have a third one!
-- Edited by Moore ideas at 12:08, 2007-07-08
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
Im fairly comfortable using the gun, though I have never shot this particular hand gun I have shot one similar to it. I spent 5 years in the Navy so I have held and shot my share of guns. Though its kind of silly, since we have a little one the gun isnt even loaded (i dont think) and so it really doesnt do me much good...though I think I could probably load it easily enough if the clip is handy. I odnt worry about shooting a loved one because the only loved one I have who could be in my house would be my husband. And when he is home I dont worry about any of that stuff. I need to get a dog.
Well, Shelly, you're competent, and I'm not. LOL...!!!
Yes, get a dog.
Or, at the very least, get one of those individual door alarms to put on your bedroom door. It's the kind that makes a LOUD noise if the contact is broken by opening the door. It's what a lot of parents who have swimming pools in their yards put on their back doors to alert them if the toddler has tried to go outside.
__________________
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"
(Dumbledore to Harry Potter)
that is a good idea. This is what I miss about living at Fort Meade, there we were on base so I never worried about it at all. Ugh. And I dont know about competent. More like just trained. I worked security for quite some time in the service so I guess you just get used to it
People have gotten really bold these days, especially where I stay at now. My brother had someone try to break in on him while he was sitting in the house. It was some kids from a high school about a block away. I think because they were coming up in the wrong direction on the street they didn't see my jeep in the driveway. We've always had an alarm for as long as I can remember. Someone has tried to steal cars while we were sleeping from our driveway on at least two occassions: Once it was a Malibu station wagon (grey), and once was a brown/tannish thunderbird. The only thing that stopped the Malibu theif was it had a club on it and he could'nt get it off all the way or get the steering wheel to turn quick enough before my dad caught him and the other one I think my dad got up and got his gun and was fixing to start ringing out shots but the guy saw him coming and took off I think.
Yeah, roberries are a problem. Its always good to get a alarm.
Oh yeah, we also have a dog that alerts us - he's half chow/half retriever (I believe).
We call him Rico! He's such a funny dog and has so much personality. He's very smart.
He has a pretty good bark so even though I don't know if he'd really hurt someone or not (likes to play to this day) he makes enough noise so that they wouldn't wanna put it to the test.
She's a jealous girl but still sexy as ever!
