Thursday, October 14, 2004
“Who’s there?!” I screamed as I sat up in bed. Something or someone had a hold of my foot. As I waited for my eyes to adjust, I heard him snicker as he pulled the covers away from me.
My heart was racing and I still wasn’t sure if this nightmare was a dream or reality. His snickering infuriated me. I jumped up and stood on the bed screaming, “How did you get in here? Who are you? What do you want?” He snickered again.
I lunged towards him from the bed—all fear gone; rage had taken its place. “GET OUT! Get out of my apartment.” I started swinging my arms wildly then kicking and, still screaming, I chased him from the apartment.
He ran out the door and to the right. Just as he rounded the end of the building, I saw part of a brick. I flung it towards him and watched it crumble as it hit the side of the building, but missed him. A few seconds passed before I had my breath again and could yell. I bawled. The sound was a very eery and I wasn’t sure it was coming from me.
A light came on in an apartment across from mine. I cried for them to please call the police. The light went out.
The noise that I assumed was coming from inside me finally stopped. I stood shaking and knew I needed to call the cops. As I turned to go back into the apartment, I realized the intruder had used the other part of that brick to prop open the door. Then I saw where the screen had been cut.
I slowly stepped into the apartment and picked up my phone. There was no dial tone. I hit the ?? a few times in disbelief. From the time I was small, I always knew that the bad guys cut the phone lines. This really was a bad guy and this bad scene really was happening to me. I dropped into a kitchen chair and started to cry again.
My eyes followed the phone cord down the wall...and into the middle of the floor. He had not cut it, he had unplugged it! I picked it up and looked at it as though I couldn’t believe it was true. “Plug it in!” I said out loud. After several shaky attempts, I finally heard the dial tone. I dialed 911 and heard, “911, is this an emergency?”
“Yes, yes it’s an emergency,” I cried. She told me to calm down and asked if I needed an ambulance.
“No, no ambulance, but I need the police.” She asked what kind of emergency I had. I explained that there had been an intruder in my apartment. She asked me again to calm down and said it was difficult for her to understand me. She assured me the police were on the way and told me not to hang up.
I sobbed for a bit then tried again to explain. She wanted to know if he was still in the apartment and if not, how did I know and how did he escape. As I was telling her that there is only one way in and one way out of my apartment and that I had followed him out the door, the police arrived.
He greeted me, then took the phone to tell the operator he had arrived. They hung up. He looked around the apartment then back at me and asked if I was ok. When he was satisfied that I would survive, he asked for my statement. I explained the story to him. Twice.
The officer repeated the story back to me and asked if we had missed anything. I added a few more details and then wondered out loud why the guy hadn’t taken anything. Officer Melton said, “Let me get this straight. The intruder broke into your apartment, did this,” spreading his arm and hand out and making a sweeping motion around the living room, “and you didn’t wake up until he was in your bedroom?”
I surveyed the living room because I didn’t fully understand what he meant. The intruder had not done anything, everything was like I had left it.
Let me explain what Officer Melton meant. The apartment was a complete wreck. This was normal for me. But to the officer, it appeared as though it had been ransacked. After I realized what he meant, I didn’t quite know how to respond. He had given me an “out.” I could stick with the ransacking story. But I didn’t.
“OH!” I said with realization, “He did not do this.” The officer seemed not to hear me or maybe he didn’t believe me. He said again that he couldn’t believe I slept through that.
“He didn’t do this.”
“Are you sure nothing is missing?”
“As sure as I can be.” My new VCR was still in the box and setting in the middle of the floor. He would had to have walked right over it to get to the bedroom. My diamond earrings were still on my nightstand near where he had stood. And $75 in cash was on the end table by the door.
About this time, a second officer, Officer Bailey, arrived. He walked into the apartment behind me. I was facing Officer Melton. Apparently Officer Bailey had looked at him as if to acknowledge the ransacking that had obviously taken place. Officer Melton shrugged his shoulders, shook his head slightly and said, “She says he didn’t do this.”
I dropped my head and started to cry again. Officer Melton asked to see the bedroom. Thankfully it was somewhat neater than the living room. But the covers were in the floor near the bathroom. Officer Melton kept making notes.
Officer Bailey asked me again if I was OK. He asked if I had anyplace to go for the rest of the night. I asked him what time it was.
“Three twenty-four.”
His preciseness of the time in all this mess struck me as funny. I tried unsuccessfully not to laugh as I told him I had a few friends I could call. He said they’d wait until I knew where I was going and was safely out of the house.
I told him that there was a young girl who lived in the next apartment. She must have heard everything and is probably scared out of her mind. She is in her first year of college and she hasn’t been away from home much. Officer Bailey went to check on her while Officer Melton stayed with me.
I dialed Carolyn’s number. I worked with her at a previous job and we remained friends. She had three children, the oldest just a few months younger than me. The other two were teenagers and Carolyn had said numerous times how much she dreaded hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night. There were other people I could have called, but most of them were my age and I just needed someone mature and comforting to turn to. So I made the dreaded middle-of-the-night phone call.
Bill, her husband, answered the phone. I was crying again by now and choked out, “Bill, don’t worry, it’s not one of your kids.”
“Then who is it?” He sounded a little perturbed.
“Kuke.” I had to catch my breath to keep from sobbing again.
“Kuke? Is everything ok?”
“No.” I couldn’t stop the sobbing this time.
He handed the phone to Carolyn and I heard her ask if I was ok. He answered her question and she said into the phone, “Where are you?”
I took a few breaths and said, “I’m at home, but I need to go someplace else to sleep tonight.” I explained a little bit of what happened. She asked if I needed Bill to come and get me. “That won’t be necessary. I have to pack a bag. I will be there in about half an hour.”
Bag finally packed, the officers lead me to the front door. I reached for my keys, always hanging by the door, but they were not there. I did a quick search, through my purse, behind the table that was below the key holder—nothing.
I looked at Officer Melton and said, “Well, maybe he did take my keys.” I had a spare for the car so I could still leave. The officers warned me not to come back to the apartment without an escort and to be sure the landlord changed the lock ASAP.
Bill and Carolyn had the sofa bed out and made up and some hot tea waiting for me. I was a wreck. They took turns hugging me and making sure I was really ok. Physically I was fine. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be several years before I was fine psychologically speaking.
Carolyn wanted to hear the full story. Bill just wanted to know why I chased a perfectly good man out of my bedroom. “You’ll never get a husband acting like that!” We all laughed, after Carolyn scolded him. It was good to laugh. I thanked Bill for that.
By five o’clock we were all settled in bed, but I didn’t sleep. I just kept going over everything in my head. I could see his face as plain as day.
The day had been unusually warm for that time of year. To help circulate air, I opened the front door of my apartment and set a fan in front of the screen door, which was locked. The intruder had cut the screen then reached in and unlocked it to let himself in. A shiver ran down my spine as I realized he had a sharp object with him and could have used it on me.
The police said nobody else called 911. I thought about all the neighbors right there who had to have heard my screams. Not one of them called for help or came to see if I was ok.
Poor Carly, the eighteen year old who lived in the apartment next to mine, was scared out of her mind. Officer Bailey said she was wrapped up in her blanket and had obviously been crying. She told him she had heard me screaming and didn’t know what to do to help. She apologized for not calling for help. He asked if she was going to be ok there or if she had someplace else to go. She said she would call home and have her brother come stay with her. I didn’t feel angry at her for not calling for help. She was just a scared kid.
The next morning I went to work. The idea of sitting around doing nothing all day didn’t sound appealing. At least at work I could keep busy and not think about it.
At work I didn’t know whether to talk about it or not. What would I say?
“You would NOT believe the night I had last night!”
“Guess what happened to me?”
“I spent half the night with the cops last night.”
Uncharacteristically, I was the first one in the office. That alone raised suspicions. As others started coming in they wanted to know if it was snowing oats or if hell had frozen over. They were being funny and I knew it. We all got along great. I really needed to tell them, but just didn’t know how.
Then I dropped my cup of tea. The cup broke, the tea went everywhere, and I broke down crying. My gig was up.
Ragina took me into her office and shut the door. I told her everything that had happened. We both knew I shouldn’t be at work but I had no place to go. I wouldn’t go home. Everyone I knew was working. She told me to take it easy and to take care of any business I needed to.
I called my landlord to get the lock changed. He did so immediately and without a hassle. Next, I called my car insurance to see if they would replace the locks on my doors and my ignition. The agent readily agreed to changing the locks, but was hesitant about the ignition. He reasoned that if we changed the locks, whoever had my keys could not get to the ignition.
I dreaded calling my overprotective mother. So instead I called my overprotective, but more sensible, father. Besides, I lived half way across the country from him. He’d be less likely to show up and make a scene or to make me move home.
Talking to him was really comforting. He scolded me lightly for having left the big door open. He told me I really needed to call my mom. He offered to send me a plane ticket to visit him if I needed to get away.
Luckily, I had already planned vacation for the next week. I was going to Canaan Valley with Mom and my grandparents. For the rest of the current week I stayed at Carolyn and Bill’s.
However, I had not packed enough clothes to last that long so I called the police station for an escort to my apartment. I gave them my name and explained the situation and said that Officers Melton and Bailey told me to call for an escort if I needed back into my apartment.
I don’t know if I wasn’t explaining myself right or if the guy I was talking to just wasn’t understanding. We were both getting very frustrated with each other. He seemed to think there was some sort of domestic violence involved. He also thought the “intruder” was someone who lived there. There was nothing the police could do if the guy didn’t want me in the apartment or wouldn’t let me in.
For thirty minutes I tried to explain that I didn’t know the intruder, he did NOT live there, and if he WAS there when I got there, the police better be prepared to arrest him. This did not go over well with the man on the other end of the phone line. Finally I gave in to his little pretend world and told him that if they guy was at my apartment I wouldn’t try to go in.
During my lunch break, I met an officer at my apartment. He again explained that if the person living there didn’t want to let me in, he couldn’t force him to. I rolled my eyes and said, OK.
When I got back to work, the police station called for me. They wanted me to come to the station to see if I could identify the guy from some pictures they had of earlier offenders. I said I would, so took off the rest of the day and went to the police station.
They took me into a room with a bunch of photo albums. They had picked out two thick ones and had them on the table for me to view. The front of both albums said, “Sexual Offenders.”
Calmly I explained that the guy was not a sexual offender, he was just a cat burglar or something. So the person who was with me to look through the books called Officer Melton. He happened to be in the building and came to talk with me.
“Hi again, Kuke,” he said as he shook my hand and sat down beside me. “I hear you have some questions about the books we have out here.”
“Yes, Officer Melton, these are pictures of sexual offenders. I was not sexually offended.”
He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Kuke, your door was propped open and your phone was unplugged.”
“Yes.”
“You said he did not take anything.”
“He took my keys.”
“But he apparently wasn’t there specifically to rob you.”
“No.”
“He came straight to your bedroom and was removing your covers when you awoke. If you had remained asleep...” His voice trailed off short of saying the obvious.
I hung my head and started to cry. The thought that the intruder was there specifically to hurt me was more than I could take. Of course it was obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it?
Officer Melton patted my shoulder and said he’d sit with me while I looked at the books. I didn’t see anyone who looked like the man in my bedroom. Officer Melton said if I remembered any more details or saw the man in the area to call the station. That was the last time I spoke with anyone at the station about it.
The intruder was never found. I lived in that apartment four more years. I could not sleep in the dark for over a year. I could not pull the shower curtain shut while I was showering for six months. When I spent the weekend at Mom’s, my brother coming into the house at twelve thirty in the morning would make me sit straight up and scream. I still can’t sit with my back to a door.
My heart was racing and I still wasn’t sure if this nightmare was a dream or reality. His snickering infuriated me. I jumped up and stood on the bed screaming, “How did you get in here? Who are you? What do you want?” He snickered again.
I lunged towards him from the bed—all fear gone; rage had taken its place. “GET OUT! Get out of my apartment.” I started swinging my arms wildly then kicking and, still screaming, I chased him from the apartment.
He ran out the door and to the right. Just as he rounded the end of the building, I saw part of a brick. I flung it towards him and watched it crumble as it hit the side of the building, but missed him. A few seconds passed before I had my breath again and could yell. I bawled. The sound was a very eery and I wasn’t sure it was coming from me.
A light came on in an apartment across from mine. I cried for them to please call the police. The light went out.
The noise that I assumed was coming from inside me finally stopped. I stood shaking and knew I needed to call the cops. As I turned to go back into the apartment, I realized the intruder had used the other part of that brick to prop open the door. Then I saw where the screen had been cut.
I slowly stepped into the apartment and picked up my phone. There was no dial tone. I hit the ?? a few times in disbelief. From the time I was small, I always knew that the bad guys cut the phone lines. This really was a bad guy and this bad scene really was happening to me. I dropped into a kitchen chair and started to cry again.
My eyes followed the phone cord down the wall...and into the middle of the floor. He had not cut it, he had unplugged it! I picked it up and looked at it as though I couldn’t believe it was true. “Plug it in!” I said out loud. After several shaky attempts, I finally heard the dial tone. I dialed 911 and heard, “911, is this an emergency?”
“Yes, yes it’s an emergency,” I cried. She told me to calm down and asked if I needed an ambulance.
“No, no ambulance, but I need the police.” She asked what kind of emergency I had. I explained that there had been an intruder in my apartment. She asked me again to calm down and said it was difficult for her to understand me. She assured me the police were on the way and told me not to hang up.
I sobbed for a bit then tried again to explain. She wanted to know if he was still in the apartment and if not, how did I know and how did he escape. As I was telling her that there is only one way in and one way out of my apartment and that I had followed him out the door, the police arrived.
He greeted me, then took the phone to tell the operator he had arrived. They hung up. He looked around the apartment then back at me and asked if I was ok. When he was satisfied that I would survive, he asked for my statement. I explained the story to him. Twice.
The officer repeated the story back to me and asked if we had missed anything. I added a few more details and then wondered out loud why the guy hadn’t taken anything. Officer Melton said, “Let me get this straight. The intruder broke into your apartment, did this,” spreading his arm and hand out and making a sweeping motion around the living room, “and you didn’t wake up until he was in your bedroom?”
I surveyed the living room because I didn’t fully understand what he meant. The intruder had not done anything, everything was like I had left it.
Let me explain what Officer Melton meant. The apartment was a complete wreck. This was normal for me. But to the officer, it appeared as though it had been ransacked. After I realized what he meant, I didn’t quite know how to respond. He had given me an “out.” I could stick with the ransacking story. But I didn’t.
“OH!” I said with realization, “He did not do this.” The officer seemed not to hear me or maybe he didn’t believe me. He said again that he couldn’t believe I slept through that.
“He didn’t do this.”
“Are you sure nothing is missing?”
“As sure as I can be.” My new VCR was still in the box and setting in the middle of the floor. He would had to have walked right over it to get to the bedroom. My diamond earrings were still on my nightstand near where he had stood. And $75 in cash was on the end table by the door.
About this time, a second officer, Officer Bailey, arrived. He walked into the apartment behind me. I was facing Officer Melton. Apparently Officer Bailey had looked at him as if to acknowledge the ransacking that had obviously taken place. Officer Melton shrugged his shoulders, shook his head slightly and said, “She says he didn’t do this.”
I dropped my head and started to cry again. Officer Melton asked to see the bedroom. Thankfully it was somewhat neater than the living room. But the covers were in the floor near the bathroom. Officer Melton kept making notes.
Officer Bailey asked me again if I was OK. He asked if I had anyplace to go for the rest of the night. I asked him what time it was.
“Three twenty-four.”
His preciseness of the time in all this mess struck me as funny. I tried unsuccessfully not to laugh as I told him I had a few friends I could call. He said they’d wait until I knew where I was going and was safely out of the house.
I told him that there was a young girl who lived in the next apartment. She must have heard everything and is probably scared out of her mind. She is in her first year of college and she hasn’t been away from home much. Officer Bailey went to check on her while Officer Melton stayed with me.
I dialed Carolyn’s number. I worked with her at a previous job and we remained friends. She had three children, the oldest just a few months younger than me. The other two were teenagers and Carolyn had said numerous times how much she dreaded hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night. There were other people I could have called, but most of them were my age and I just needed someone mature and comforting to turn to. So I made the dreaded middle-of-the-night phone call.
Bill, her husband, answered the phone. I was crying again by now and choked out, “Bill, don’t worry, it’s not one of your kids.”
“Then who is it?” He sounded a little perturbed.
“Kuke.” I had to catch my breath to keep from sobbing again.
“Kuke? Is everything ok?”
“No.” I couldn’t stop the sobbing this time.
He handed the phone to Carolyn and I heard her ask if I was ok. He answered her question and she said into the phone, “Where are you?”
I took a few breaths and said, “I’m at home, but I need to go someplace else to sleep tonight.” I explained a little bit of what happened. She asked if I needed Bill to come and get me. “That won’t be necessary. I have to pack a bag. I will be there in about half an hour.”
Bag finally packed, the officers lead me to the front door. I reached for my keys, always hanging by the door, but they were not there. I did a quick search, through my purse, behind the table that was below the key holder—nothing.
I looked at Officer Melton and said, “Well, maybe he did take my keys.” I had a spare for the car so I could still leave. The officers warned me not to come back to the apartment without an escort and to be sure the landlord changed the lock ASAP.
Bill and Carolyn had the sofa bed out and made up and some hot tea waiting for me. I was a wreck. They took turns hugging me and making sure I was really ok. Physically I was fine. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be several years before I was fine psychologically speaking.
Carolyn wanted to hear the full story. Bill just wanted to know why I chased a perfectly good man out of my bedroom. “You’ll never get a husband acting like that!” We all laughed, after Carolyn scolded him. It was good to laugh. I thanked Bill for that.
By five o’clock we were all settled in bed, but I didn’t sleep. I just kept going over everything in my head. I could see his face as plain as day.
The day had been unusually warm for that time of year. To help circulate air, I opened the front door of my apartment and set a fan in front of the screen door, which was locked. The intruder had cut the screen then reached in and unlocked it to let himself in. A shiver ran down my spine as I realized he had a sharp object with him and could have used it on me.
The police said nobody else called 911. I thought about all the neighbors right there who had to have heard my screams. Not one of them called for help or came to see if I was ok.
Poor Carly, the eighteen year old who lived in the apartment next to mine, was scared out of her mind. Officer Bailey said she was wrapped up in her blanket and had obviously been crying. She told him she had heard me screaming and didn’t know what to do to help. She apologized for not calling for help. He asked if she was going to be ok there or if she had someplace else to go. She said she would call home and have her brother come stay with her. I didn’t feel angry at her for not calling for help. She was just a scared kid.
The next morning I went to work. The idea of sitting around doing nothing all day didn’t sound appealing. At least at work I could keep busy and not think about it.
At work I didn’t know whether to talk about it or not. What would I say?
“You would NOT believe the night I had last night!”
“Guess what happened to me?”
“I spent half the night with the cops last night.”
Uncharacteristically, I was the first one in the office. That alone raised suspicions. As others started coming in they wanted to know if it was snowing oats or if hell had frozen over. They were being funny and I knew it. We all got along great. I really needed to tell them, but just didn’t know how.
Then I dropped my cup of tea. The cup broke, the tea went everywhere, and I broke down crying. My gig was up.
Ragina took me into her office and shut the door. I told her everything that had happened. We both knew I shouldn’t be at work but I had no place to go. I wouldn’t go home. Everyone I knew was working. She told me to take it easy and to take care of any business I needed to.
I called my landlord to get the lock changed. He did so immediately and without a hassle. Next, I called my car insurance to see if they would replace the locks on my doors and my ignition. The agent readily agreed to changing the locks, but was hesitant about the ignition. He reasoned that if we changed the locks, whoever had my keys could not get to the ignition.
I dreaded calling my overprotective mother. So instead I called my overprotective, but more sensible, father. Besides, I lived half way across the country from him. He’d be less likely to show up and make a scene or to make me move home.
Talking to him was really comforting. He scolded me lightly for having left the big door open. He told me I really needed to call my mom. He offered to send me a plane ticket to visit him if I needed to get away.
Luckily, I had already planned vacation for the next week. I was going to Canaan Valley with Mom and my grandparents. For the rest of the current week I stayed at Carolyn and Bill’s.
However, I had not packed enough clothes to last that long so I called the police station for an escort to my apartment. I gave them my name and explained the situation and said that Officers Melton and Bailey told me to call for an escort if I needed back into my apartment.
I don’t know if I wasn’t explaining myself right or if the guy I was talking to just wasn’t understanding. We were both getting very frustrated with each other. He seemed to think there was some sort of domestic violence involved. He also thought the “intruder” was someone who lived there. There was nothing the police could do if the guy didn’t want me in the apartment or wouldn’t let me in.
For thirty minutes I tried to explain that I didn’t know the intruder, he did NOT live there, and if he WAS there when I got there, the police better be prepared to arrest him. This did not go over well with the man on the other end of the phone line. Finally I gave in to his little pretend world and told him that if they guy was at my apartment I wouldn’t try to go in.
During my lunch break, I met an officer at my apartment. He again explained that if the person living there didn’t want to let me in, he couldn’t force him to. I rolled my eyes and said, OK.
When I got back to work, the police station called for me. They wanted me to come to the station to see if I could identify the guy from some pictures they had of earlier offenders. I said I would, so took off the rest of the day and went to the police station.
They took me into a room with a bunch of photo albums. They had picked out two thick ones and had them on the table for me to view. The front of both albums said, “Sexual Offenders.”
Calmly I explained that the guy was not a sexual offender, he was just a cat burglar or something. So the person who was with me to look through the books called Officer Melton. He happened to be in the building and came to talk with me.
“Hi again, Kuke,” he said as he shook my hand and sat down beside me. “I hear you have some questions about the books we have out here.”
“Yes, Officer Melton, these are pictures of sexual offenders. I was not sexually offended.”
He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Kuke, your door was propped open and your phone was unplugged.”
“Yes.”
“You said he did not take anything.”
“He took my keys.”
“But he apparently wasn’t there specifically to rob you.”
“No.”
“He came straight to your bedroom and was removing your covers when you awoke. If you had remained asleep...” His voice trailed off short of saying the obvious.
I hung my head and started to cry. The thought that the intruder was there specifically to hurt me was more than I could take. Of course it was obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it?
Officer Melton patted my shoulder and said he’d sit with me while I looked at the books. I didn’t see anyone who looked like the man in my bedroom. Officer Melton said if I remembered any more details or saw the man in the area to call the station. That was the last time I spoke with anyone at the station about it.
The intruder was never found. I lived in that apartment four more years. I could not sleep in the dark for over a year. I could not pull the shower curtain shut while I was showering for six months. When I spent the weekend at Mom’s, my brother coming into the house at twelve thirty in the morning would make me sit straight up and scream. I still can’t sit with my back to a door.
