Neighborhood Crime Watch, Small Business Owner, and... Thief?

Soooo.... As many of you have heard (or I'm guessing you have from the amount of texts that I've been getting) my house got broken into the other day. I promised Catlin that I would blog about it, so this is for Catlin... and the children.

Me, my mom, and my brother were all getting ready to head out for Christmas Eve service at Central Baptist when my mom asked what we were going to do with Riley while we were gone. I hadn't really thought about it because I usually just leave her in my house and she doesn't bother anything, but mom was a little apprehensive about leaving her in her house. We decided that the easiest thing to do would be to stop by my house on the way to church and leave her there and then pick her up on the way home. So we did. We stopped by, I let her in the house and then ran upstairs to get a new contact since one of mine had torn and then we headed to church.

Church got out around 7 and we headed straight back to my house to pick up Riley, my glasses, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, and check on some stuff for Chad (of the Barber persuasion). Background information: Me and a couple high school friends had been at the house the night before watching Mr. Brooks and consuming some.... beverages. Naturally, I didn't clean up and my mother would have a cow if she walked in to see certain "beverage" cans and bottles strewn across my living room. So, I decided to just tell her and my brother to stay in the car and that I'd be back in a minute.

In my infinite wisdom, I forgot to turn the outside light on when I left so it was really dark at the door where I was having a magnificent amount of trouble getting the key into the door knob. Being the resourceful Fighting Texas Aggie that I am, I used my watch light to look at the door knob and see what was wrong with it. Immediately I noticed that instead of the key hole being straight up and down like normal it was horizontal... Strange, but our door handle has a habit of being awful so I didn't really think anything of it. I thought that in my rush to get out the door to go to church that I hadn't shut it all the way or that it was just getting looser than it already had been. In any event, I wasn't thinking anything suspicious. From there I just pushed on the door (without turning the handle) and it came open... And here's where the fun starts.

As soon as the door was open wide enough for me to see in, someone came running at me. He was carrying something and in his haste to get out the door he gently brushed me aside and dropped what he was carrying into the flower bed next to our door. It took a second for me to realize what happened, but as soon as it clicked I took off after him. It must have been reaction or instinct or something because looking back on it, this was probably the dumbest thing I could have done. What if he had been armed? What if there had been someone else in the house? I left my mom and brother in the car having no idea what was happening.

After throwing caution to the wind, losing my untied shoes in the yard, face-planting in the middle of Glade St. (I'd like to give a shout out to 'ol Glade for the awesome scrapes on my side, knee, and toes), and running farther than I have since I graduated high school I finally caught up to..... a 36 year old man.

Football instincts kicked in and I tackled him and then proceeded to basically sit on him all the while asking him questions laced with sugar and other sweet things, and by that I mean F-bombs and "Who the hell are you's." My brother had finally put together all the pieces and he wasn't too far behind us, being the track star that he is, and so I sent him to get mom so that we could get a phone out of the car and call the 5-0.

They were there in no less than a minute and took him into custody after which my brother decided it would be a good idea to run back to the house and see if there was anyone else there. He ran inside, picked up the nearest beer, I mean "beverage," bottle and proceeded to check the rest of the house. About the time he was done the rest of the Police showed up to the house to check on everything and as he walked out he got some pretty pointed questions about who he was and what he was doing there. Me and mom realized about this time that he was at the house and how that would look to officers driving up and so we asked one of the officers with us to radio and let everyone know that he was supposed to be there.

After filling out Police reports, watching as they fingerprint dusted the majority of my house, getting pictures taken of my wounds and finally convincing everyone that we should go home, we got out of there and went back to Mom's house.

There was a story in the paper and then the news guy came by last night and interviewed me so I got to be on TV, which was pretty cool, but I hate listening to myself so it wasn't that cool. Other than a couple scrapes and being afraid to open the door when I come home everyone made it out without any injuries or serious psychological issues. The guy lives like three doors down from me which creeps me out a little but my roomies will be home pretty soon and if worst comes to worst, Nathan can scare him off by doing the stanky legg while Chad bikes after him and Andrew screams complicated Chemical Engineering formulas at him.