...Trick...or Treat? Our Robbery is Solved.

I got a call at 1210 today.

From the local police department.

A detective on the other line informed me there had been a search warrant executed on a home on Friday evening, and that in going through the items several documents with our names on them had been found.


He wanted to know when I could come to the police station to identify the items and any other possible belongings that may be ours.


Uhm, How about RIGHT NOW?!?

I was there in about 10 minutes.

They had all our social security cards, except my husband's, and all our birth certificates except Pudah's.

They had our passports, and our marriage licenses.

They found my Great-Grandma's box.  Empty. The insides ripped out.

There was a very large tuff box, stolen from another solider, which was piled high with personal belongings these criminals had haphazardly dumped inside.  The office gave me a pair of rubber gloves to dig through this mound of personal effects searching for anything I might be able to identify as ours.

I found one blue ribbon, that I won in 1st Grade in an art contest.

No letters from my husband. No journal. Nothing else.  Just piles and piles of other people's personal property.  Dumped like trash.

I felt like I was going to vomit.

The officer told me if it made me feel any better, the people who had done this had the very unpleasant experience of having their home raided in the middle of the night with a SWAT team, flash grenades and tear gas. (They had stolen some guns most recently, and had committed an armed robbery.)

It did make me feel a little better.

They seemed to have been looking specifically for personal things, but what they kept and what they trashed had no rhyme or reason that anyone can see.  They had stolen all these wooden boxes like my own.  They had tons of photos and jewelry and paperwork.  They had even been trying to print fake money on a stolen color printer.

Seriously?  Seriously.

These people were not good people, but they weren't very clever either apparently.

And so, our little home invasion is brought to a conclusion.  A conclusion no one thought would ever happen.  The bad guys are in jail.  Many other families will find some, but not all, of their precious things returned to them.  We can take comfort in knowing the people responsible for violating us in this way will be brought to justice.

And that is certainly more than we ever imagined would happen.

Happy Halloween everyone.