Ah, what an interesting couple of days it's been, for those of you keeping track a very large, slow moving hurricane passed over Florida (it's now meandering through the panhandle hitting the last pieces of Florida it missed on the first strike). Here's my interesting little story on the "damage" that our apartment received.
We went to bed around midnight or so on the first night, we figured that we would try to get a little rest for the long day of wind and rain ahead. About 4/4:30 in the morning my wife and I heard the sound of glass breaking, we got up and found the window to our office (the second bedroom) was broken (the screen still intact though). Not five minutes after our discovering of the broken window did we receive a knock at the door. A guy claiming to be a neighbor (Christine said she recognized him), told us that he heard the glass breaking and was wondering if we needed any help. He said he had tape and plastic so we agreed that any additional help would be useful. He helped tape up the window and after chatting with him for a bit, we thanked him and bid him good night.
Little note: A couple of weeks before all this we discovered a very large Apple monitor sitting on the edge of the dumpster, I fished it out knowing full well that a monitor has all sorts of nasty things in it that shouldn't be rotting away in a garbage dump. We put the monitor (extremely heavy) on our enclosed patio intent on recycling it. The thing didn't move an inch for the last hurricane (Charley - and no we didn't leave it outside for the first hurricane on purpose, we were in Boston for Charley), so we decided that putting it in a far corner of the patio (I repeat enclosed patio) would be safe. When we discovered the broken window what was sitting on the ground a couple of feet under the window? Yup, that monitor, but the story get's wackier so just keep that image in your head.
We'll fast forward to the next afternoon after the discovery of the broken window, we receive a knock on the door. It's another neighbor with a sketch of the guy that helped us the night before. Turns out, the guy that came into our house, taped up the window, and we babbled with, was caught breaking windows around the neighborhood. To make the story even more bizarre, after breaking the window he would ask if the people needed help. A whole group of people (people this guy did this to) ended up at our house and we all told our stories to the building manager. They ended up going to the guys front door (dumb bastard told us what apartment he was in), and arresting him.
Here's the final piece that I've yet to find out (the police are supposed to take a statement from us about this so I'll have to ask them for the full story), what the hell was this guy thinking? Did something snap in his head and he had to get all destructive and then feel a twinge of guilt and help the people? Was he casing the places he was destroying? Was his intent to loot? Remember that monitor I mentioned before? This is all just theory, but we think the guy broke our patio screen, grabbed the monitor and used it to break the window, because after close inspection there was no way that huge monitor was dragged (no drag marks on the ground) and then lifted up enough to break the window. We weren't experiencing winds speedy enough to lift the thing up. That part completely creeps me out, that this crazy bastard might have broken into our patio while we were asleep. Ugh.
But all is well now (the apartment complex has temporarily patched the window), and Florida is a freaking mess but I guess that's the trade-off we Floridians have to deal with, near the beaches, nice weather, with the occasional spinning clouds of doom.
Here are some pictures Christine took through the hurricane (no pictures of the broken window though). Enjoy.
Posted by bkirsten at September 7, 2004 01:22 AM | |