You might think that living on the edge of practically Edina would be all cake and high school sports but you’d be wrong. The view out our front window may be of baseball fields and tennis courts but several times a week, emergency vehicles fly by, lights flashing and sirens squealing as emergency responders rush to the site of trouble.
Yes, the trouble is usually a fender bender or someone in one of the nearby nursing homes having a heart attack but once in a while there’s a break in and the sirens remind us that life in the big…medium…smallish sized city can be dangerous.
Or so I’ve heard.
In the thousand or so years that Jay and I have been married, we’ve had a car broken into and the radio stolen, our underground garage broken into and both our bikes stolen, our back porch broken into and a bike stolen off of it, and a few things pilfered from our various front yards but in the quarter century that we’ve lived at this address, the biggest problem we’ve ever had was a neighborhood kid borrowing a basketball without asking.
Until now…Wait a minute!
Now that I think back on it, I realize that all those break ins and bicycle thefts happened during our two different stints of living in Uptown. The occasional theft and hold up is part of that neighborhood’s charm, so I can’t complain.
Where was I?
Until now.
Yesterday morning, Jay planned on going to the Y for a workout but when he got to the garage he discovered both cars had been ransacked. Glove compartments, consoles, even the case for glasses in one of the cars was opened and emptied.
Nothing was missing. We don’t keep anything of value in our cars and apparently my extensive collection of the soundtrack to Nashville isn’t worth pawning. Once again, my bad taste has saved me money!
It certainly looked like a crime of opportunity. We’d left the garage door up the night before so there was no need to break before entering. The cars had been left unlocked so there was no need to shatter a window. What bothered us (in addition to the insult of an attempted burglary) is that our garage is in the back of our property, which is completely surrounded by a six-foot privacy fence. The only way in or out is all the way up our very long driveway. To ransack cars in our garage is to take a very high risk for essentially no reward at all. I mean, sure: the quarters Jay kept for meters were gone but would you risk being shot for $2.75? I wouldn’t.
But no one ever said burglars are smart.
We had a new cement floor poured in that garage last summer. It’s still very dusty. The perp (a little cop lingo, there) left a perfect shoe print on the back seat of one of the cars. Zack took one look at it and said “Whoever it is, they’re wearing Air Force Ones.”
We decided we’d best call the cops, if for no other reason than to alert the neighborhood that someone is marauding in the night. An officer was here an hour later taking down all the info we had. Turns out, six or seven other cars in the vicinity had been broken into and ransacked Friday night and one was stolen. I’m glad we called! They had someone in custody. I showed the Officer the shoe print. He asked if it could possibly belong to anyone in our family. I told him Zack had already identified the tread and no one in our house owns a pair. He immediately got on the radio to find out if they’d taken note of the shoes the suspect was wearing. Then he took photos of the shoe print. Evidence! All those years Zack spent poring over EastBay catalogues has paid off!
Since we leave nothing of value in our cars, nothing was taken. If the burglar had simply put everything back where he’d found it and closed the compartments, we never would have known he was there. Who knows how much time would have passed before we noticed a footprint on the back seat? As it is, his discourteousness may cost him.
So the lessons of the day are: Close the garage door, don’t leave valuables in your car and always clean up after yourself.
And if you must burgle in Nikes, don’t rob a basketball family.