August 23, 2005 – Learning What It’s Like to be Ripped Off

August 23, 2005 – Learning What It’s Like to be Ripped Off

After we arrived in California in October 1974, courtesy of Diablo Systems Inc., a Subsidiary of Xerox Corp., we bought a house on Hellyer Avenue right across the street from Hellyer Elementary School. Our first-grade bound, first-born daughter ME was late getting enrolled but by the first week of November she was already making friends—the thing she does best—and catching up on the course materials she had missed. ME already had a couple of years of Montessori pre-school, however, as a parent, the first real day of school for your child is a momentous occasion. You’re surrendering a vast part of your baby’s intellectual cultivation to someone else. You’ve also just set the timer in motion that will take you to middle age and beyond, your children rushing the timer forward as you wish you could slow it down.

As IM got ME off to school, I spent the early weekends in our new place landscaping the bare earth lawn in our front, side, and back yard. We had a corner lot. The development we were in was full of young families, adults our age with elementary school age children. The neighbor to our rear had a young son and an older daughter from a previous marriage. The husband, a nice guy, liked to race cars and had his racer in his driveway on occasion. He had a day job, working in construction, which helped finance his expensive hobby and his wife also worked. He like to regale me of his exploits on the racetrack, something I enjoyed as all men of my age, had excess testosterone circulating in his blood and speed was its natural expression. I recall him describing a crash that destroyed his racer at the oval track on Tully Road—the one we could hear in the distance on hot summer nights when our windows were open. He had “bought that wall” and walked away unscathed.

The one couple who was not in our age group was our neighbor on Hellyer Avenue, a retired Air Force Colonel, DB, and his wife, VB, with a high-strung, house-bound German Shepherd both treated like one of their kids. The couple’s adult age children, three sons and a daughter, were all out of the house except the youngest. As an ex-Army kid, I understood what the siblings had gone through their young lives, being moved from one armed services encampment to another. IM formed a neighborly relationship with VB. DB and I would talk whenever he ventured out to work in the yard, which was frequent when we first moved in but increasingly less as time went on. As IM, the girls, and I were starting life together, DB and VB had already been there, done that—kind of like where IM and I are now that the girls are grown and raising children of their own.

Our Hellyer Avenue home was the early years of our life in California, the years from 1974 through 1979—the lion’s share of the 70s decade. Right after we got settled we began to hear stories of houses in the neighborhood being burgled when no one was home. I was working in the yard one Sunday when someone ran out of neighbor’s house at the rear carrying the race car driver’s television set, which he dumped into the back seat of a car then jumped in as a female driver gun the engine and sped away. As I saw the man open the car door and hastily deposit the TV in the back seat, I dropped the shovel I had been holding and ran after the car as it pulled away memorizing the license plate. I called the police and reported the theft giving them the license plate, the direction the car was traveling as it drove away and what little description of the burglars I could remember: Hispanic male in his mid-twenties carrying the TV, Hispanic female of the same age; both in jeans and white tee shirt; no distinguishing facial features, long dark brown hair on the malel, short cropped dark brown hair on the female—fit the description of a lot of people in San Jose including me—though I was out of the age group. As the police arrive a good 30 minutes later, the owners also returned from their shopping outing. I explained what had happened and they went inside with the police to survey the damage.

Seeing the ease with which the thieves entered my neighbor’s place, I told IM that I was going to the hardware store for deadbolts to reinforce the doors. When I returned, I added one to the side garage door, putting the new lock halfway the distance between the existing doorknob and the bottom of the door, screwing the hardware into the two-by-fours surrounding the doorframe. I installed keyed deadbolts on both the front and rear door—you needed a key to open the door from inside or outside. Anytime we left home we took the keys with us. After a day of reinforcing the locks on all our doors, I went out to check on my neighbors who had been invaded. I learned that after the police had left, the couple and their son decided to shut their house up and go visit family elsewhere in San Jose. When they returned home that evening, they found that the thieves had returned and taken a few other possessions left behind when I interrupted their plunder. The police officer had told them that the burglars would steal a parked car use it to transport the stolen goods to a location where they moved the stolen property to another car and abandon the hot car—so much for my taking down the license number of the getaway vehicle.

I returned home thinking that this gang of thieves was determined and resourceful. I began to wonder if my extra precautions were a sufficient match for them. One Friday night a week later I had the answer to my question. We returned home after going out to dinner and as soon as I entered the house I could sense someone had been inside, probably from the smell, the scent of someone strange. As we walked into the living room and looked into the kitchen, we saw the broken rear window and the sliding glass door left open. The thieves had tried to enter the house by the side garage door and had been unable to force the deadbolt I had installed. Frustrated, they broke the rear window, reached in and opened the sliding glass door and entered the house. Once inside they tried to enter the garage from inside the house but found the deadbolt blocking their way. They then began rummaging through the house picking up easily carried items, a camera, a small stereo in the den... We must have interrupted their progress as the television and other heavier items had been left behind. Also, the bedrooms had not been thoroughly searched, as IM’s jewelry had not been found.

We called the police and an hour later an officer came in to examine where the break in occurred and what items had been removed. The only obvious sign of theft was the broken glass of the rear kitchen window and the dangling wires in the den where the stereo had been disconnected from the speakers and turntable. The officer was polite, told us there was little chance any of our stolen things would be recovered but told us to make a list of the item we found missing and send a copy to police headquarters with the case number he provided us. The thieves would be caught but by the time they were, our things would have already been long gone—sold at the Tully Road Flea Market or fenced through a dealer in stolen property. I asked him how we might prevent this in the future and he suggested a burglar alarm system with private security service monitoring the house when we weren’t around. After he left, IM and the kids were still pretty spooked and I told them I would stay awake while they went to sleep. I stayed up a good part of the night but eventually dozed off in the early morning. I woke Saturday morning and repaired the window and then called several vendors that installed decorative window bars. We got estimates and accepted the one promising installation in two days. He would return on Tuesday to put the bars up.

In the meantime, I took a couple of days off work and stayed in the house whenever IM had to go out to run errands. On Monday morning, IM took off and I watched her car drive down Hellyer Avenue toward Senter Road. The was the usual time she left to drop our youngest daughter RD at a Montessori Pre School near the intersection of Capital Expressway and Almaden Expressway, a great little school that RD looked forward to attending. As soon as IM’s car had passed out of sight beyond Hellyer School, an old dilapidated four-door white Chevrolet pulled up on Sacramento Avenue where it T’s into Hellyer. He stopped on Sacramento on the side next to the school and got out of the car, looked right into the kitchen window where I was standing looking at him and abruptly turned his back, opened the driver side door, released the hood of the car from under the dash board and open the hood. He looked around for no more than ten seconds, closed the hood and got back into the car and drove away looking once at me as he sped away. He was a tall black man, black hair short-cropped to this head, with a wiry build wearing light blue jeans, white T-shirt and tennis shoes. I knew he had been in our house and he knew I knew it. He also knew he would not be getting in again.

Once the bars had been installed, IM, the kids, and I stopped worrying about burglars, though they continued to happen in the neighborhood, though the retired couple next door was not burgled. DB and the German Shepherd never left the house and DB had a gun. On one weekend, several neighbors working in the yard saw two men running from a house on Sacramento Avenue. The men gave chase and caught one of the two. He pleaded with them to beat him up but not called the police. They beat him up then called the police. It was rage and frustration of being helpless to stop offenses against the normalcy that the homeowners all felt was their right. The police came and took the thief away. The officers wisely skipped the lecture on neighbors taking the law into their own hands. The burglary that violated the sanctity of our home taught me that even in the most civilized of worlds, ultimately the individual is still responsible for his family’s well being.