Our Scary Weekend

On Saturday night, at 2:15 in the morning, I was woken up by the sounds of men yelling. I was groggy and not sure where it was coming from. Then there were dogs barking, and a bright light illuminated our house. Jay and I jumped out of bed to try to figure out what was going on. There were about five cop cars spotlighting our house. A bunch of policemen and dogs were in our front yard yelling. Needless to say, I was scared out of my mind. Jay put on a robe and went outside to see what was going on. Apparently, the police had been tracking a man through our neighborhood with their dogs, and they found him in our front window well. This is the window to our girls' bedroom. I am still totally freaked out about that.

The girls, by this time, had run upstairs. My wonderful husband calmed them down and explained what was going on. They didn't seem to be too scared, just full of adrenaline. They hadn't heard the man in the window well, but woke up when his feet were banging on the window as he was dragged out. Somehow, Jay managed to get them to go back to bed and they fell asleep pretty quickly. Later, he told me that he had told them to say a prayer that they would be safe and could fall back asleep. I wish he would have reminded me to add that to my prayers. I was just praying thank you's that nothing terrible had happened to us. I couldn't sleep the rest of the night.

I was mentioning what happened to a member of our bishopric on Sunday as I waited for Hannah to get done with a meeting. Brother Johnson, who is a canine policeman, happened to walk in, and didn't know anything about what had happened, but he made a phone call to find out. During the night, a police officer was following what looked to be a drunk driver. He didn't even turn his lights on before the car sped away into our neighborhood. The policeman carefully drove in the direction of the drunk driver, and found the car wrecked in someone's yard on the street up from our house. There was no one in the car. They checked who the car was registered to, and went to the house which was just a few streets up from us. They found a man there who looked like he could have been in an accident. The man said he was the guy they were looking for. By this time, the canine officers had already started looking through the neighborhood, and the dogs had picked up a scent. They decided to follow it and see what they found. They found, of course, the man hiding in our window well.

Brother Johnson says people hide in window wells all the time and he has woken up a lot of people with barking dogs and spotlights in his time. He did say, though, that in his eighteen years, he has only ever had someone try to break into the house once. That doesn't make me feel too much better. I am still highly creeped out. We make sure to leave the porch lights on at night now. And, we are looking into getting window well covers. I can't believe this happened in our neighborhood. Obviously, I'm incredibly naive. This certainly isn't the worst that has happened around here. I feel really exposed and vulnerable.