After reading this exciting story about a guy who was instrumental in the capture of a couple of other guys for ripping off his credit cards, I was reminded of an incident that happened at my house a while back. It doesn’t involve me being particularly clever or brave, and it has nothing to do with the internet, but it was fairly exciting at the time and will hopefully make for an interesting read.

The following is based on an account written shortly after the event [which I didn’t feel like posting publicly at the time].

Sunday 19th January 2003 - 7:20 PM

Richard, Jo, Coco and I returned home from an afternoon at the movies. We live on the top floor of a three story building in a semi-industrial area.

After climbing our stairs we were surprised to observe a rather large and messy hole in the wall which normally serves to separate my bedroom from the stairwell.

Not very pleased, we all muttered "uh-oh" (or words to that effect), then descended to the bottom of the stairs again, where I called 000 [same as 911] to report the break-in (in a slightly shaky voice). The operator told me that would send someone out.

Richard decided to drive around the block to check out the back of the building, while the rest of us waited out in front.

7:38 PM

Some time later, after waiting around feeling annoyed and powerless and trying to guess what might have been stolen, we were rather startled to see the lower door being opened from the inside. Strangely, although we had decided to wait for the police before entering, it seemed none of us had seriously considered that someone might actually be still inside.

At that moment we three looked at each other and seemed to come to some sort of unspoken decision that we would try to be "brave" rather than squeal and run away, so we advanced on the opening door, saying stern things like "Stay there please!" (although it might have sounded more like: "Blar! blar! blar!").

And so we came face to face (through an external metal security door) with The Burglar—an Asian guy [my incredibly detailed description], maybe in his 40s, wearing glasses—and for a few disconcerting moments we actually had some sort of strange conversation [I honestly can’t remember what was said].

He went to leave, attempting to nonchalantly push past us as you might sidestep a co-worker in a narrow corridor, and at this point we (Jo, mostly) insisted that he not do so, especially since he appeared to be carrying a bag which belonged to her. He said "Sorry, I didn’t know" and tried to make out that there must be some mistake, at which point Jo got rather cross.

7:40 PM

While The Burglar just sort of stood there at the bottom of our stairwell looking somewhat put out, I tried to appear menacingly tough as I dialled Richard on my mobile phone to ask that he come back around the front immediately. I then passed the phone to Jo to make another 000 call, a bit more urgent this time. During all this we just sort of leaned against the security door to underline our intent to keep him from leaving; we had no way of actually locking him in.

7:41 PM

Moments later Richard came hooning around in the car and Coco [very coolly] suggested he park it up against the external security door, thus preventing The Burglar from making a sudden break for it. Having done so Richard immediately took off again on foot, which at first was rather confusing to me, until I realized that he was racing around to watch the back of the building again. I was so frazzled that the possibility of another escape route hadn’t even occurred to me — but it sure had occurred to The Burglar; sure enough the stairwell was suddenly empty.

He had left Jo’s bag behind (it weighed a ton because it was full of all our spare change in various containers) and popped back upstairs to look for another exit. And we could do nothing, since by locking him in we had also locked ourselves out — although it’s not like I would have chased the guy anyway.

When Richard got round the back he was just in time to have a bit of a shout at The Burglar, who had apparently been contemplating the jump from a rear window, but now thought better of it and disappeared inside again. Since the front exit was blocked I ran around to join Richard in case he needed backup, but he seemed happy enough on his own, so I headed back around the front again.

Then, with nothing better to do, we waited for the police to arrive.

It’s an awkward position to be in; standing outside one’s house with an intruder trapped inside. Rather disconcerting. You start wondering, "Hmmm… maybe this was not such a great idea…"

We stood there and stared up at our windows, two stories up. Having had no previous experience in such a situation, I half expected to see a television, or maybe even our cat, to come flying through them. Who knew what he could be doing in there?

Nothing happened.

We coninued to wait. And wait, and wait. It probably wasn’t that long, but it felt like forever. Finally the police turned up, three of them in two cars (not sure what time it was — amazing how one can forget to check one’s watch at times like this) and once they realized that the guy was still on the premises they really perked up.

I reversed the car away from the security door and then followed two of the cops up the stairs. Just before I opened our front door for them [the gaping hole in the wall was not so inviting, with splinters and glass-fibre insulation everywhere] we heard the alarm in the building next door go off.

Once we were inside it became pretty clear that The Burglar had jumped from a side window and onto a landing next door [risking a 20-foot fall]. From there he had broken a window and crawled inside, presumably setting off the alarm as he did so.

It was no small relief to realize that he [probably] wasn’t in our house anymore. To be safe, we still did a lot of checking around as loads of extra police started showing up. A security guy also arrived in response to next-door’s alarm; He was friendly but perhaps a little too keen to see action. A couple of plain clothes detectives also turned up, and climbed up onto the roof to check for possible exit points.

Then we all had to wait again, this time for the next-door owners to turn up and provide access to their building. Coco and Jo were still out front, Richard was out back, police were everywhere, and I was looking around to see what had been messed with. The DVD player was missing, but apart from that I couldn’t really see that anything else was gone. Monkey (our cat) was fine, which was a relief, so I sent him up to play in the ceiling for the duration.

Finally the owners turned up, as well as a rookie police dog and handler. They opened up the building next door and went inside. Without too much effort (go dog!) and a little bit of barking and shouting they soon found their man, hiding in a dumpster at the back of the building. [Richard mentioned later that the police in the back lane knew where he was all along because they had seen him start to open a rear door. They had called out for him to cooperate but got no response.]

Eventually The Burglar was escorted out, handcuffed, and stuck in the back of a paddy wagon, while we supplied fragmentary information to a bunch of different people whose names we kept forgetting. By this time it must have been at least 9PM…

The police took the heavy bag full of coinage for evidence, as well as Jo’s watch, which The Burglar was still carrying when apprehended. There was no immediate sign of the DVD player, but we eventually discovered it just inside the front door in a plastic bag, and were asked not to touch it in order to preserve any fingerprints.

Later, we learned that the police already had a pretty good idea of who The Burglar was before they nabbed him. He is/was a local, a known petty offender and already suspected for a bunch of similar break-ins in the area. This made us feel a little better, in that he was already wanted for multiple break and entering, rather than just for stealing our spare change.

Overall, we came out of it surprisingly well. Nothing else was broken or lost, and even the wall was not as badly damaged as it first appeared. We were able to repair [and reinforce] it ourselves without incurring additional expenses.

Lessons learned:

• Police can be very enthusiastic when they have half a chance of actually nabbing someone.
• Even a wall can be turned into a door if someone really wants to get in.
• Trapping someone inside your house is probably really, really dumb; we were just lucky that he was not the aggressive type.

Epilogue

The Burglar went on to spend about six months [!] in jail waiting for trial, then pleaded guilty and served the remaining month or two of his sentence.

In preparing their case the police needed to know the actual value of the bag full of coins, and so had it counted at a bank and converted to notes for us, dropping by a few days later to hand us the $300 or so in cash!

Coco no longer lives here, but she does read this blog. Hopefully she won’t mind if I point out that my initial assumption that her room had been ransacked turned out to be mistaken — it was in fact just as she had left it ;)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2005 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.