The Whole Story

So we would leave the back door open for the dog to come and go during the day. She's old, 14, and she sleeps a lot and I hate to leave her out and it gets dark early and so on and so on. A gang of 4 or 5 out of south central the cops said, came to our neighborhood. They ring doorbells, nobody answers. Its in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. There is not a soul around. So they hop a wall. The fucking back door is open. So this house is easy pickings, they leave one guy here, they put a chair in the back corner of the yard, hop into a neighbor's yard and they can take their time breaking into that one because its even more isolated from the street. They have a guy in a getaway car circling outside with a cell phone. They are doing maybe three- four houses all at once. The cops say they are two teen-agers and two adults (probably all guys) - I asked questions at the station when we went and were given back our stolen items- I was afraid it might be kids I knew from my Boy Scout Troop, but they were a traveling band from from south central that they had been trying to catch for months. Anyway, the kid in my house, starts for our bedroom. They have  MO: jewelry and electronic devices quickly carrying out. The old dog in sleeping at the foot of our bed.  He's experience- you don't fuss with the animals- that makes noise- they might bite you; so he closed the door, keeping the dog from him and the rest of the house. He hits my son's room. He understands teen-age sons. He grabs a pillow case and takes the bear's foreign coin collection from his childhood, his Boy Scout Eagle medal set, a high altitude watch the bear's girl friend had given him for his backpacking trips. A watch his grandfather had owned. The robber rifles everything. The bear's yearbook from high school is thrown under his bed. That was the telling item. The robber maybe spent a few minutes looking at my bear's life. I understand this. I had jack shit when I was a boy - the kids I went to high school with were off on skiing trips
and I had to work. One kid went off to Africa for a year with his father on a dig. (we know what a dig is, don't we?) and I went to Drexel MO for a week. Anyway, he's moving on, hits the daughters room, starts on other stuff. Meanwhile, the two on the other house are leaving by the front door. A neighbor lady that's home spots them, calls the police, sees a couple of off duty cops who live nearby out for the morning walk and alerts them. The cop cars are here! The lookout calls the kids in and they drop what they are doing and run out to get picked up. Four get arrested and one gets away. When we went to get our stuff the cops were going to take the four individually to their homes with search warrants to search for other stolen goods. I had to stay home the next day to wait for the police fingerprint duster to come do our house. They got good prints, because the kid was respectful of the surfboard and gently set it aside in my bear's room and in our family room, he set a plant carefully on the carpet from atop a trunk so he could look in the trunk. His Grandmother probably had plants that she cared for.

We need to provide some how for these kids.