Crime in the Country

Crime is everywhere, but some places have more, and some places have less. Living in the city, crime was a daily thing you heard about. Living in rural America crime happens, but on a much smaller scale. One of the reasons why I was happy to leave the city was to get away from the crime. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that someone would attempt to break into a house close to the farm. Luckily, it was not our house that it happened to, but it was close to us. It was Aunt T and Uncle D’s home, just down the road from us.

Yes, it was insane to hear from Aunt T the day after it happened that someone attempted to get into their home in the middle of the night. Lucky for her, her dog alerted her and woke her up. One thing you need to know about Aunt T is that she is pretty much deaf. Over the years her hearing has declined drastically and even hearing aids do not help a lot. She can only hear a little from one ear, so she reads lips a lot. She hears only certain things, and they need to be loud.  

How the Night Unfolded

Each night, she removes her hearing aids, so it was good her dog was by her and alerted her to the situation. On this particular night the dog woke her, she just thought she needed to go outside. She still did not have her hearing aids in, but she got up and went into the bathroom. While in there she heard a loud noise outside the bathroom window. She proceeded to go back to her living room and peak through a window and low and behold there was a man standing at the door. She quickly grabbed her phone off the windowsill and headed to the master bathroom.

While in the bathroom she put her glasses on and put her hearing aids in. She also grabbed a weapon and called 911. As she was talking to 911, she stepped out of her bedroom and saw the doorknob of her front door jiggling and then stopped since the door was locked. As she was going back and forth between her bedroom and dining room, she caught a shadow of a person on the floor of her dining room at her back sliding glass door. This really freaked her out and she loudly said, “he’s at my back door.” The person must have heard her because she saw the shadow disappear. She stayed on the phone with 911 while waiting for the Sheriff to arrive.  

From the time she called 911 and the Sheriff arrived, it was about 15-20 minutes. The sheriff walked around the home and did not find anything. No tracks from a vehicle or footprints on the driveway, which leads to the idea there was a second person. He did tell her that about 20 minutes away in another small town, there had been a lot of burglaries occurring. He thought it might be the same group of people moving east.  

Prefect Setting For a Crime

While all this unfolded, Uncle D was out of town. He was away for work and had been gone all week. The day before this happened, I had been down to check on Aunt T to make sure she was good and take her trash out if she had not been done already. When I checked on her, she was not feeling good that day, so she had not done much. Her T.V. was on, but her lights were off except for her bedroom. There was a lamp on in there. As I left her home and dropped trash off at her dumpster, I had the thought that her house looked extremely dark.  

Lessons Learned

Looking back at the things, we are pretty sure their house was being watched. Her van never moved that week and having no lights on set up the perfect idea that nobody was home. They live on the corner where two roads meet, so they have traffic on both those roads. 

We have only one road in front of our house, and we installed our camera system we had bought while living in the city the weekend before this all happened. Call us whatever you want, but we knew that even living on the farm, the camera system was going up. After finding out the time when this all went down, my husband went and pulled up our camera system to see if we caught anything from the road.

Guess what?? We absolutely did. About 5 minutes before the Sheriff arrived, we have a vehicle driving slowly past our house and just as it passed our driveway, they turned off their headlight and kept moving in the direction of Aunt T and Uncle D’s place. Unfortunately, the angle of the camera to the road, we did not see exactly what type of vehicle it was or the license plate, but it looked like pickup truck.  

Crime Prevention

This experience gave us the opportunity to take action and prevent this from happening again. We talked to our neighbors and they began looking at their own systems if they had one. It also allowed us to come up with a plan for the future that if anyone gets a phone call from the group, we can make sure nobody escapes the area. We do not want to have crime in the country, so we will be more diligent in what we do.

We were lucky to have installed out camera system when we did. With having our camera system up and running we were able to get a general idea of what happened that. We are now in the process of purchasing cameras for Aunt T, Uncle D and Papa. None of us ever thought this would happen, but now it is all about prevention.