Someone broke into my husband’s car last night. From the looks of it, the window break was hasty and furtive. (Is there any other way to break into a car?) Glass shards cover the driver’s seat as well as the ground next to the driver’s side. In their zeal, bits of glass also flew up and landed on the car’s roof. A mess of multi-colored wires, like entrails, can be seen spilling from the dashboard, where the stereo used to be.
This is the second break-in for the car in this parking spot near the front of our house. It is admittedly not a very safe parking spot. Previous owners of either our house or the one next door at one time placed a cyclone fence down the middle of the shared driveway, blocking off auto access to the garage in our back yard, but preserving the garage access next door. The remaining width on our side is just shy of the amount of room a car needs to fit through, leading me to believe that the house may have been vacant at the time the fence was put up. It definitely saw some rough days of abandonment at some time in the recent past, from the stories I hear.
The sellers we bought from, who rehabbed it as an "investment property" (they sold rather disappointed, I think), put up a new wooden fence alongside the existing cyclone fence down the middle of the driveway. In so doing, they completed the boxing-in of the back yard with a little jog of fence to the house, leaving just enough room for a small paved parking spot. It’s very available to the sidewalk, a car-sized, isolated stage, spotlighted by the nearby streetlight. Passers-by looking to steal are front-row customers.
The car went for nearly two years with no stereo—what’s the point?—because of the first theft, when we had just moved in to the house. It was a rainy Thanksgiving weekend and the burglary occurred overnight. In the morning, we discovered pouring rain soaking the inside of the car, glass everywhere, stereo gone.
We finally replaced the stereo in the spring because of my husband’s long commute, and a related need for news or music to make the drive bearable. He got one of those stealth-mode stereos that has a fake faceplate come down when you turn it off, to make it look like you took off a faceplate, when you really didn’t. Guess it didn’t work. Or maybe it did, for a while. Who knows how many thieves took a peek in there and decided against smashing? All we know about are the ones who opt to go for it.
Today my husband can’t get to work—almost an hour’s drive away—because he has to be accessible to the glass repair guy. He called the non-emergency police number, 787-6320, at 8:00 am to report the burglary, and was relayed to 911 instead. Apparently the non-emergency number only works after 9:00 am. He also then learned that he had to call a different number, 750-2525, to report the theft. One learns these things on an as-needed basis. Could be worse.
Break-ins usually lend themselves to grumpiness, and we are no different today. The twist in our story is the current brinkmanship (on a marital, not international, scale) on whether to stay in Springfield or move closer to my husband’s place of work. Naturally, today’s incident didn’t contribute to his feelings of love and tenderness toward our neighborhood, and my jokes and exploitation of the photo opportunity and blogging subject matter don’t really help.
At times such as this, it’s strangely reassuring to hear others’ break-in stories. Please have at it.
