Break-in and Suspect Vehicle Spotted

[ninemm]

I had a break-in on July 15th (a Wednesday) at 11:15 a.m.. Normally, I would have been home but I had bought a skid steer loader in Surgoinsville, TN and an equipment trailer in Somerset, KY and was out of town picking them up. The outward appearance would have been the same to a burgular whether I was there or not. All of my vehicles are kept in the garage and normally I'm working in my study with no TV or radio. The burgular broke the glass out of a one-lite patio door (the kind with blinds between two panes of glass) and grabbed two laptop computers from the living room that we has carelessly left in plain sight from our patio. The motion detector triggered the alarm. It's certainly a good thing for the burgular that I wasn't home. And probably for me, too. I made up my mind a long time ago that if someone breaks into my home with me there that it is unlikely they'll live to do it again (my Glock19 w/33 round magazine is always right next to me). My neighbor has video surveillence and we got an image of the car but were unable to read the plates. Then yesterday (08/01) I was about a half mile from my house running an errand when I spotted a possible match to the vehicle. The vehicle was headed toward my home (I was headed away). So, after it passed I executed a U-turn in the street and tailed him from a distance but I think he noticed me turning around. It is also possible that he recognized the vehicle I was in as it would have been easy for him to have checked my garage and seen my vehicle as the door to the garage is only a few feet away from where the door glass was broken out. When he turned on a street that runs by a municipal golf course, I followed. Then, he turned into the golf course parking lot so I figured maybe it was just a guy going to play golf. So I shrugged it off and made the block and returned to find him leaving the golf course parking lot and heading back the way he came. I continued to follow him but it was obvious he was trying to lose me. He was pretty far ahead and ran a stop sign and then turned into an on-street parking space in front of a Catholic church that had a lot of cars there. I turned down a street a block before and made a U-turn and waited at the stop sign. I could see that he backed out and continued south. I got in behind him again and caught up to him at a major intersection where he caught a red light and there was lots of traffic. At this point, I got his license number and buyer tag number (in the back window). When the light turned green he really shot out of there and was probably going 75-80 mph. I had to let him go. I went back home to study the video of the car again and, although you can't read the plates, there was the unmistakable image of a rectangle (the buyer tags) in the back glass of the heavily tinted windows in the same spot as on the vehicle I tailed. Other than it being a mid-to-late 90's white Lincoln Town Car, there weren't any other distinguishable features of the car.

I know I would have killed him had I been home. The real question is whether or not I would empty the magazine on him.