We were Robbed!

I don't mean figuratively. Tonight our house was illegally entered, ransacked and valuable items stolen. I can't sleep now because I'm still upset by it. It is such a violation! This is not helping my current sense of rage.

Here's the story. Jen and I went to Arcelia's for dinner because we've been craving Mexican food. Just before we left the house I took the trash out to the dumpster in the alley. I think I forgot to lock the door behind me when I came in and we left for dinner immediately afterwards (7pm). We were thrilled that there wasn't a wait. We got a table right away and ordered our meals. Afterwards we came home (8:30pm). Right when we walked in the door I noticed some lights on and I joked to Jen that she forgot to turn them off. She said she didn't leave any lights on. I noticed the couch cushions were messed up and I orderd Jen out of the house while I looked around. One peak upstairs and I saw the disaster. Every drawer was pulled out and dumped on beds and the floor. I went outside to tell her to call the cops. I remembered that my neighbor behind the alley had been working on his car all day so I went back there to see if he had seen anything and his wife said that she saw 4 or 5 young black males walking out of our house about an hour and a half earlier (very close to the time we had left). She's a schoolteacher and described them as being between 7th and 10th grade and wearing the usual long white T-shirt and blue jeans that every single kid in the neighborhood wears.

We didn't want to touch anything in the house until the cops got there. I did go down in the basement to see if anyone was hiding down there and saw the basement door, which is always locked, was wide open. The cop arrived, took a report and called for the crime lab to show up and take fingerprints. The crime lab guy was no CSI guy. All he did was tell me how he couldn't get fingerprints off anything. Everything had either too many fingerprints or wasn't a surface that he could get fingerprints from. No help there.

We started cleaning up and taking note of what we had lost. The first thing I noticed is that a bowl full of change had been emptied. About $20 worth of change. Then Jen started naming all of the things that kids would want to steal. I ran to the office and saw that my MP3 player, our digital camera and our video camera had all been swiped. We also found a can of soda in the bedroom and realized they stole beer and a 12 pack of Pepsi from the fridge. The worst, though, was the video camera. The case contained our entire library of irreplaceable family videos. I know it could have been worse, but it could have not happened at all.

I try to be polite as flocks of school aged kids walk down the middle of my street cursing and yelling at each other and everyone else. I tell myself that they are rude, but they haven't been taught any better. Lack of manners doesn't make them criminals? From now on I'll be suspicious of every kid that walks by my house. The cops said that they are most likely neighborhood kids. Which ones? I want to know. I want to smack the shit out of them and then, when I know I have their attention, give them a piece of my mind. This is a fantasy. I'll never know who broke into my house. Just like I'll never know who stole both of my cars 2 years ago, vandalized my motorcycle last Summer, broke the rear window in my Liberty last Fall. I just have to pack those feelings away until the rage subsides and come to terms with the fact that life isn't fair. Things get stolen from good people and these miserable little punks have terrible home lives and will most likely remain bums or go to jail. Life isn't fair. Count your blessings.