Cheryl's Snippets: A Bit of Excitement

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Coming back from Zambia, I was content to lead a boring life, one without daily adventures such as I encountered in Zambia. At our welcome back to Fresno party, there was a shooting on the street two houses down from where we were mingling with friends, but that hasn’t happened since. And our garage was tagged with graffiti one night but the graffiti patrol came and painted over it when we called in the incident. But usually it has been blissfully dull. Until last Friday. I had said goodbye to my mother-in-law who left earlier that morning after a delightful visit (with my father-in-law joining her for part of the time). My parents had just driven up from Pasadena for a weekend stay and I was feeling relaxed after an adjustment from the chiropractor. I arrived home to see my mom pacing on the front porch and glancing periodically at our neighbor’s home across the street. There were two men with a clipboard and a measuring tape who were walking all around the house and the backyard taking measurements and pictures. She had noticed these same two men doing the same thing near my brother’s house when she dropped something off there before coming to our place. Knowing that these neighbors had recently sold their home, we wondered if they were appraisors or surveyors or something of the sort. But then we remembered that Peter’s colleague was recently robbed just two blocks away in the middle of the day which made us suspicious again. I tried calling our neighbors on their landline but there was no answer. I tried calling the wife and left a message. I saw the two men go into the backyard and I decided to just go over and see what their business was. But when I got into the backyard, they were nowhere to be seen. I walked around the house and saw the kitchen door standing ajar. That’s when I got nervous. I quickly walked back over to my house and called the husband on his cell phone. Thankfully, he answered and I asked him if there was a reason why anyone would be in his house. “No, there is absolutely no reason anyone should be in my house!” I asked if I should call the police and he told me, “YES!”

So I called the police and talked to a lovely lady dispatcher. When I explained the situation, she said she was sending four units, two with canine units. She told me to go inside and lock all the doors because sometimes suspects bolt into the nearest house when they are being pursued. But I remained watching out the window so I could be her eyes and ears. She asked if the owner had been contacted and I said that he was the one who told me to call but I couldn’t say if he was coming home or not. My mom and dad were working at getting the owner’s phone number from my sister-in-law because I couldn’t get off my phone to retrieve the number. Suddenly, the two men emerge from the backyard and the police are still nowhere to be found. If I had a transcript of my phone conversation with the police, it would read like this:

Me: The two men are coming out! They are heading to the car! Where are the police?

Dispatcher: They are on their way. Just keep watching what they do.

Me: (Owner of the house comes screeching around the corner and pulls in front of the car with the two men in it) Oh no! Here comes the owner!

Dispatcher: Tell me he isn’t getting out of his car.

Me: HE’S GETTING OUT OF HIS CAR!

Dispatcher: Tell me he isn’t confronting the two men.

Me: HE’S CONFRONTING THE TWO MEN!

Dispatcher: OH MY GOD!

Suddenly, four police cars come racing in from four different directions and surround the car and the house owner. One policeman gets out of his cruiser with his gun near his belly and says to the owner, “Sir, please step to the curb.” (This comment and the rest is what the owner later told us.) Turns out the two men were appraisors for the seller. They were just doing their job. But apparently, their boss did not do his job. He was supposed to notify the owner that they were coming a day or two in advance. And the owner was told that there was not going to be a lock box (with a key for realtors to get into the house) but one was placed there without their knowledge, which is how these guys got inside. Once the appraisors showed the owner and police the lock box, they were allowed to go. I felt terrible for them, because they were black and it probably felt like racial profiling to them. I didn’t have the chance to apologize to them but I did to the owner. He had left his cart in Costco and drove 85 miles an hour down the freeway to get home and was so pumped full of adrenaline by that time that he didn’t stop to think before confronting the two men. As he said, “They must have been terrified of all 5 foot 6 and a half inches of fury coming at them!” We had a laugh about it but those two men probably weren’t laughing. But we wouldn’t have been laughing if it had been a robbery and we saw but didn’t act at all.