After that break-in attempt, I talked with neighbors who I saw to warn them and I immediately heard about other incidents, which led me to canvas more widely and discover still others.
(Something like that break-in attempt doesn't seem like a one-off affair, and since it's so unusual for the neighborhood, you would almost think that other stuff had been happening, but the individual people who saw the individual events were writing off their individual experiences as one-time flukes, and not realizing that they were representative of something larger.)
And, this is what I quickly uncovered had been happening in the area during like the previous 6 weeks or so:
1) At the big co-op house right across from where I live, a guy was watching TV with a friend and felt like they were being watched, and they look, and someone's staring in the window at like 11pm at night, so one quietly gets up and goes outside, and the guy is sitting up on a basement-window dormer looking in and another guy is standing on the ground beside him, both (fat) (bearded) (white) guys on the (younger) side, and when they see him, both run and go hide behind some tall bushes around the front corner of a neighboring building, and one lies flat on the ground behind some smaller bushes, so you can't see him in the dark.
2) After that, the same guy watches the building more at night, and like 3 days later he catches a(n old) (dirty) (white?) (homeless) lady standing up on another basement dormer and looking in another window, someone who he's previously seen around and trying doors and asking people to use their showers.
3) After that, the same guy talks to someone cutting grass at the neighboring building where the guys had run and hid, and the guy says he's the owner's son, and that they've been having recent complaints of people looking in first-floor windows.
4) Like in the next block-and-a-half there's a report at one place of a run-of-the-mill opportunistic package theft, and at another place the discovery in the morning of someone sleeping on that apartment building's porch.
5) An owner of a home business with a big front porch and a fence around her yard tells me that her security camera caught people letting themselves into the yard during the day and lounging on her porch-furniture when she wasn't there, a few weeks earlier.
6) A roommate of someone tells me that their roommate had been asleep in her attic bedroom when everyone was gone after close of semester and you can hear everything in the house, and they heard someone opening the chained-back door like two to three times to the full extent of the chain at like 2:30 in the morning, and they freaked out and locked their bedroom door and didn't call police, because they weren't sure if they were sleeping and dreaming it all up, but they also wanted to be safe.
7) A couple who live in the building where someone had been found sleeping on the porch say that one evening they were cleaning the upstairs part of their apartment until like 11:30pm -- they had lost track of time -- and then they come downstairs and as soon as they do so, someone starts knocking at their front door aggressively and like trying the door handle, and this goes on for sheer minutes as they call the police, but when the police arrive, the person is gone.
8) It turns out that at the building near me where he's lived for almost two years, my one (Chinese from China) coworker has suddenly been battling package thieves for the past few month -- after stolen packages, he put a sign up for mailpeople to take any packages that fit and put them inside the mailboxes, which led to pried-open mailboxes, which led to him getting a camera and finding footage of 2 separate people coming in off the street into the parking-lot area where the mailboxes are, and caging out stuff for theft.
9) Another neighbor who just moved in has seen someone in the afternoon walking down the middle of the street, looking into every car that they pass, although they didn't call police because they didn't know if this was normal for the neighborhood or not.
. . .
Overall, it seems like the neighborhood has had occasional package thefts or drunk college student antics or occasional occasional crap by the one neighborhood liquor store in the past, but nothing like this, from everything I could gather.
Just a huge leap up in activity, this summer!
Locals who heard all of these stories from me were all kind of shocked, to tell you the truty.
Historically, it's always been such a quiet neighborhood.
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