Village Trustees ... Stick to Parade
Schedules & Planting our Parks
Many of us have experienced a sense
of violation upon returning to our homes, only to find
that someone else has been there. Someone else has
trespassed in our bedrooms, looting and stealing that
which is readily replaced. Many of us, still haunted
by that violation, will never again have a sense of
security in our own homes. Few, however, have awakened
to realize that they had been violated as they slept
in their beds, doors locked, as family dogs patrolled
their homes. For me, the seconds until I found my
children still safely tucked in their beds were
horrifying. The thought that a young child may have
been hurt or abducted was incomprehensible.
The police were called and in
routine fashion they came, took the report and with
little concern left, promising to increase
surveillance. Little comfort, since the invader now
had keys to our home and our automobiles. The police
informed me that this was not an uncommon event in
east Wilmette and offered their condolences.
What is one to do when a criminal
proceeds, undeterred by a 90-pound German shepherd, an
alarm system and a property ... lit up like an outdoor
stadium? And now, he had my house keys and an
inventory of things he'd like to call his own. Would
the police patrol my dead-end street as effectively
the second time as they had the first? Would my small
children be unharmed the next time? Would the career
criminal be satisfied with another automobile, another
television or would he feel the need, once again, to
climb the staircase up to the bedrooms, perhaps for a
watch or a ring or a wallet, again risking little?
Would my children wake to find a
masked figure, clad in black, in their bedroom
doorway, a vision that might haunt them for years?
Would the police come again and fill out yet another
report, and at what point should I feel comfortable
that the 'bad guy' got everything he wanted and
wouldn't return again, a third time?
I went to the safe where my licensed
and registered gun was kept, loaded it for the very
first time and tucked it under the mattress of my bed.
I assured my frightened children ''that daddy would
deal with the bad guy ... if he ever returned.''
Little did I imagine that this brazen animal was
waiting in the backyard bushes as I tucked my children
into bed.
Fifteen minutes after bedtime, the
alarm went off. Three minutes after the alarm was
triggered, the alarm company alerted the police to the
situation and 10 minutes later the first police car
pulled up to my home, but only after another call was
made to 911, by a trembling, half-naked father. I
suppose some would have grabbed their children and
cowered in their bedroom for 13 minutes, praying that
the police would get there in time to stop the
criminal from climbing the stairs and confronting the
family in their bedroom, dreading the sound of a
bedroom door being kicked in. That's not the fear I
wanted my children to experience, nor is it the
cowardly act that I want my children to remember me
by.
Until you are shocked by a piercing
alarm in the middle of the night and met in your
kitchen by a masked invader as your children shudder
in their beds, until you confront that very real
nightmare, please don't suggest that some village
trustee knows better and he/she can effectively task
the police to protect your family from the miscreants
that this society has produced.
This career criminal had been
arrested 30 times. He was wanted in Georgia and for
parole violations in Minnesota. How many family homes
had he violated, how many innocent lives were
affected, how many police reports went into some back
office file cabinet, only to become some abstract
statistic? How is it that rabid animals like this are
free to roam the streets, violating our homes and
threatening the safety of our children?
If my actions have spared only one
family from the distress and trauma that this habitual
criminal has caused hundreds of others, then I have
served my civic duty and taken one evil creature off
of our streets, something that our impotent criminal justice system had failed to do, despite some thirty
odd arrests, plea bargains and suspended sentences.