Crime and Punishment

Writing about Black Jack Ketchum yesterday reminded me of a couple of other dumb criminal stories.  When I was in college in Arlington, I lived about a block from a self-serve car wash.  At the end of the car wash, there was a very small office or storage area.  An enterprising Vietnamese man bought the car wash and turned the small space into a convenience store.  Well, being surrounded by apartments catering to college students, the store did pretty well with its alcohol and nicotine sales.  The only problem was that its success was noticed by the criminal element too.  Three weeks in a row, on Sunday at 9 pm, a hooded man came through the door with a gun.  He would order the owner into the restroom, close the door and steal all the cash from the cash drawer.  Well, as Black Jack Ketchum learned, consistency or predictability is not a good trait for a criminal.  On the third week, the store's owner had the routine down pat.  The masked man walked through the door.  The owner did not even have to be told what to do next.  He just came out from behind the counter, walked into the restroom and closed the door.  Here's where he had planned a little change in routine.  He had left a handgun on a shelf above the restroom door.  So the owner gave the thief enough time to start prying the cash drawer open, and came out of the restroom firing!  The holdup man threw up his hands yelling, "it's not real!  it's not real!" and threw the gun down and ran out the door.

Adrenaline or pure anger took over in the owner though.  He chased the robber outside still firing away.  The robber ran across the traffic on busy Cooper Street, down two blocks and disappeared somewhere down Park Row Avenue.  Police found him by following the blood trail to the dumpster behind KFC where he was hiding.  Like Forrest Gump, he had suffered a gunshot wound to the buttocks.  

While I lived in the neighborhood, my apartment or house was robbed twice, and broken into at least two other times.  The first time, thieves stole my weight bench and all my weights from my enclosed patio, right outside my bedroom window while I slept...with the window open.  I probably did not want to catch anyone who could quietly steal 200+ pounds of weights, a bench, and bars. 

I lived in a duplex that was broken into three times.  The first time, my roommate came home while they were stacking our stuff up beside the front door.  My labrador retriever was not the best watch dog.  He was sitting on the recliner with a tennis ball in his mouth while the thieves were running out the front door.  He did recover in time to snarl and growl aggressively at the police officers when they arrived.

The last time, they did get a lot of stuff.  Gus, my lab, was locked in the backyard at the time.  So the burglars were able to work without being required to play catch for hours.  The thieves completely trashed the house looking for valuables.  Being college students, we didn't have much.  They even left my Apple II+ computer.  It's probably worth more now as a collectible than it was then.  When the police arrived, they went through the living room, noting the missing television, vcr, and stereo.  They went into my room where every drawer was emptied and left on the floor.  All the books had been pulled from the shelves.  It was a mess.  The kitchen had been similarly ransacked.  Then they got to my roommate's room.  Clothes were everywhere, dresser drawers were hanging open with socks and underwear draped over the edges.  Trash was everywhere.  The policewoman said, "well, it looks like they didn't miss anything this time."  Jim, my roommate, then had to tell them that he didn't think the thieves had made it back to his room.  That was the room's normal condition.  

But my best break-in story was while I lived in a loft apartment alone.  On a nice fall night, I decided to try to reduce my electric bill and sleep with the downstairs window open instead of running the air conditioner.  I wore contact lenses that you could sleep in at the time, so I had no glasses.  Once a week, I soaked the lenses overnight, so I would go to bed blind as a bat.  Late at night, I woke up hearing voices downstairs.  I walked over to the railing that overlooked my living room and saw a leg coming into my window.  I felt around under my bed where I stored my camping stuff.  I found my ax.  Don't know why I thought I might ever use an ax on a camping trip, but I had one.  I grabbed it and started toward the stairs.  I very stealthily stepped down to the third step and gracefully, but menacingly ran/stumbled/fell down the stairs while yelling and waving the ax over my head like a madman (I was actually trying not to cut my leg off as I fell)!  I heard a scream from the window and then the sound of the would-be burglars running out of the parking lot.  I decided I could afford a little a/c after that.  And became a firm believer in the use of deadbolts.