Thieves…. again

Well, yes, again, as you can read in the tittle of the post, one more frustrating thing, frustrating and scary!!! Jeeeeez!

This weekend, I have been working, cleaning and getting things out from my husbands business (this was our old flat), even if he is still working there, we have to take everything out because we had a flood and need to get it the whole floor repaired.

Well, saturday evening, I was coming back to the business, my 3rd time that day, I just had to plug all the “techy” systems back, PC, big screen, laptop, printer and all his business machines (videos and other physio stuff).

While I was climbing up the stairs (the business is in the first floor), and just before turning the corner and go up the last stairs to the floor, I heard a very familiar noise, the noise it makes our flat door when you open it. Then I thought.. mmmmm maybe my husband has come back early from his business trip? But he would have warned me…. So without thinking about it twice I continued going up.

As I was reaching the floor, suddenly I saw a man going out of our flat!!! He just got out, and slamed the door, turned around and he found me in front of him (he didn´t realise I was going to that flat). Jeeeeeez I almost fainted!!!!!

This guy, not spanish, was quite at ease himself, comfortable even, so I just confronted him saying: “Hey you!!! What were you doing there????” He answered: “Me?? Nothing! Nothing! Me do nothing!”, I repeated more loudly: “I said what were you doing there!” and his answer again “Me do nothing, nothing I swear!”. I kept telling him, shouting now: What were you doing there!!!” and he said: “Me nothing, house my friend, house my friend”, so I shouted at him: “You ARE LYING! What were you doing there???!!!!”

Then the guy run down the stairs leaving me there, while I started running after him too, and when I got out of the house I just saw him turning the corner of the house, so then I decided to stop running and what had just happened started sinking…. what would I have done if he had taken out a knife when I was confronting him? Or what did I think I would have done if I had catched him when I run after him….. You just don´t think, and act when something like that happens even if you have strict instructions of what to do….

I got very nervous and phoned the police, since I didn´t dare going in the flat thinking that maybe someone else was still in.

The police came and they got in the flat with me, luckily nobody else was there, all the lights were on and he had left all the techy stuff next to the door ready to come back to pick it up. The worst part is that the lock was untouched, not even damaged, nor was the door itself, nothing at all. The police doesn´t understand either how he could get in. We all had our keys and nobody had lost them….

During the next hours I was in a “CSI” chapter (less glamurous and less effective I must say), with the fingerprints´ team who finally after checking everywhere and not finding any “positive” fingerprint (I can´t believe how they do it in TV, where they find a fingerprint and they scan it and send it through a mobile phone and they find the guy), they finally found 1 fingerprint that it could may be used…

Then, I went to the police station, to report everything and since I had seen the guy´s face very well, they asked me if I wanted to do an “identification parade”, so I said “OF COURSE!” (Naive me, I thought I would be in one of those rooms behind a glass wall looking at thieves and killers)… Finally after 2 hours waiting, I ended up 2 hours later on looking at a power point presentation with over 600 faces of “potentials”, and “bloody hell” how dangerous all of them looked like! AND of course not finding the guy.

After I finished  I thought about asking for one of those guys who “draw” when you tell them how the face was but I thought the policemen would laugh at me so I didn´t…

Lessons learned:

– Get a second lock. The police said that they would think it twice if the door had two locks.

– When being at home, lock the door WITH THE KEY (I always thought that you had to leave the door unlocked in case something happend and the firemen had to come in, but they said to me that this is an urban legend).

– fyi, and I guess that it depends on the country, but in Spain, the insurance doesn´t cover a lock replacement if the lock is not damaged EVEN if the thieves have gone in the house and you can prove it. No matter that many people harm the lock themselves after an incident, so that the insurance at least covers this. Of course this difficults the police investigation since the evidence is tampered.

– Also fyi, even if you make a “fake” report (to get your lock changed by the insurance company) saying that you lost your keys and that is how they got in the house (police evidence also tampered with this), they won´t pay for the new lock, unless you also lost your ID. With this, you will just difficult the police work since they won´t investigate how they got in the house thinking that they had the keys which in fact really didn´t.

So, let´s try to be fair, and if we want at least to have a chance to get these crimes solved, let´s not make fake reports, even if it´s frustrating that at the end, the only thing you get back when something like this happens to you, is a story to write or tell and a scare hard to forget.