Thought I Was Safe

[Excaliber]

My question(s) is this...Did the woman find her dog???

Yes, the other day I saw this woman walking her dog in the apartment complex and talked with her for a moment. She was very grateful that the dog was returned unharmed, although he was found near a busy intersection more than 1.5 miles from home. (I guess he had a microchip or ID tag.) Of course she's extremely lucky that she came through the incident unscathed. The lady said the intruder was expecting to find someone else in that apartment (i.e., he broke into the wrong apartment), and he was startled to find her instead and was yelling his drunken head off. Weird stuff sure does happen.

It happens quite often.

My team investigated a small series of apartment burglaries where the burglar used a fire exit stairwell to exit the roof and climbed down from balcony to balcony on the 8 story building to reach the apartment he wanted. He entered through the unlocked sliding door and confronted the occupants at gunpoint. He tied up the female apartment owner and her son and demanding to know where the "stuff" was. They couldn't tell him, because they didn't have anything that matched what he was looking for. He eventually got frustrated and left.

A few days later there was a similar burglary in the same building in the same line of apartments one floor down with the same result. These incidents were unusual, even for the crazy stuff we were used to seeing.

My investigators put their heads together and decided it would be a good idea to talk to all the owners of the apartments in that line. When we spoke to the gentleman who occupied the apartment above the one in the first burglary, he was decidedly nervous. We explained to him that the folks who went to this kind of trouble were serious individuals and things would likely not go well when they found the person they were looking for. Locating and removing the "stuff" and publicizing that event would be the best course of action to prevent a very unpleasant night for someone. He then opened his sizable safe and turned over an equally sizable stash of drugs. That cleared up the mystery pretty quickly.

Living near these folks can be almost as risky as being one of them because the people that want to rip them off aren't real careful with their research.

The burglary where the dog was taken (or simply let out) may have been another example of a similar target identification error.