Burley's Blockwatch :)

Lately we have been seeing way too much of this at our house...

It goes without saying that we live in a small community...a village. There isn't a stop light, but there is a 4-way stop at each "end" of main street. It's a small town. We live close to the west end of town, and the best thing about our location is the fact that there are only three houses on our street...if you travel north on our street, you quickly dead end into farmland and then the Wastewater Treatment Plant. Basically, if someone is on our street in the evening, they are either lost or up to no good.

Last Friday night, we bought a new dvd at the Christian book store, and decided to watch it after the kids went to bed. I think we started it around 12:15 a.m. At about 1:30, just as I was deeply involved in the plot of the movie, we heard a car outside our house. After a couple of minutes, Greg noticed that the driver had backed into the drive of the village garage, which is just across the street from us. He turned off the vehicle's lights, and then they sat for a little bit. Pretty soon both of the passenger doors opened, and two people went around and opened the trunk. Greg told me to come and watch where they went (there are some woods directly behind where they were parked), and he got dressed and got his gun. As I watched, more people started piling out of the driver's side, and they carried bags and boxes from the trunk, across the street, through our front yard, right along our bedroom window, on into our backyard. I told Greg that there were several of them and they were in the backyard, so he went out on the porch, loudly racked a shell into his gun, and hollered at them. They didn't answer and he couldn't see them, so he came back to the bedroom, gave me another gun, and told me to call the police. He figured it was drug related, since we have a relatively quiet neighborhood without a lot of kids that hang out. You would have had to seen me to understand how freaked out I was at that moment! I went in and checked on the kids, and called 911. I couldn't tell how many people were in the car because it was a little foggy, but I told the operator it appeared to be 6 0r 7. She kept me on the line until the police arrived. Fortunately, the cop from our church, who was working second shift, had stayed over to talk with the 3rd shift cop, so he recognized our address, and they both came. One of them went over to the car to run the tags, and the other took off through the backyard to find the intruders. Within just a couple of minutes Greg came in laughing and said, "Well, those kids just had their fun ruined!" To my relief, the "culprits" were four young adults (one was minor) from one of the local Bible Believer's churches. They were toiletpapering some friends from another Bible Believer's church, whose property borders our backyard. If I could have seen long hair and skirts on a couple of them, I would have felt a little less threatened, but with the mist and the fog, they all looked like men! Anyway, to conclude the story, they had already dumped about half the toilet paper on the trees, so the cop told them they would need to come back the next day and clean it up. Greg told them that if they had just answered when he hollered, he would not have called the police. They said they didn't hear him. What made it a little more interesting was that one of the guys was unknowingly driving on a suspended license because of some misfiled insurance paperwork from a previous speeding ticket he had received. Because of that, he has to appear in court, and could not drive home that night.

Moral of the story: teach your kids that it is not safe to cross private property in the middle of the night...especially right by someone's bedroom window! Some trigger-happy maniac (or scared homeowner) may just blow them to bits! :) By the way, Burley's Blockwatch is recruiting new volunteers, if you're interested!~