Cops, Robbers and Betty

I live in the South Eastern part of the USA. Where I live, crime is much lower, or I would expect it to be much lower than most other parts of the USA. Still, I am paranoid of being ripped off. I have an alarm on my house, religiously double lock my doors and make sure I lock the car. Except for last night.

Let me digress for a minute. Quite a few years ago, after a crooked business partner and a couple of poor business decisions, I ended up a homeless person in New York from October to March. If you are homeless in the winter, you definitely want to be in Southern California or Southern Florida, not New York. Of course me being me, warm weather was nowhere to be found. Sometimes life sucks, but I never robbed anyone of anything and I was able to work a few odd jobs and got to drive a limo for a while until I had enough money to get back somewhere where I could start over.

It was about 5:35 AM Tuesday morning and I was putting my clothes on to exercise a bit before getting ready to go to work. I had my short pants, T shirt and one shoe on, but not tied. Betty, my little dog who sleeps in a "crate" at night because she will pee and poop all over the place when she is unsupervised was growling. My roommate, Desiree, was on her way back from the bathroom to her room said that she thought I had been out there as she heard something.

I turned on the light and saw that things weren't quite right. I opened the car door and saw that it had been rifled through. We ran out to the street and saw two people running down the street. We started out after them. It took two blocks to catch them, but we did, and I got all my stuff back. My left foot was bloody and my ankle was swelling, but I was glad I got the stuff.

I don't run....it's not that I just don't, I can't. I had a head on collision 10 years ago when I was living in the Bahamas and broke both ankles, a knee, my pelvis, my hip socket was in 7 pieces and my sternum was split. Other than the bump on the head, I was ok. I was pretty happy that I was able to run down the perps. Until I realized they couldn't run very fast because of all the crap they were trying to carry. They were a homeless couple...and drunk. I was still pissed, but they took off after I got the stuff, but I would not have been able to go after them anyway with my ankle and hip starting to ache.

The police came, 3 cars worth, and rode around the neighborhood, but didn't see any one. One of them took a report and basically said they couldn't do anythign about it. All they had were descriptions and I didn't lose anything so findiing a judge who would take out a warrant without names, addresses or not missing anything.
Whatever happened to breaking and entering was a crime??

They also chastised us for going after them. What if they had been armed? I said how do you know I wasn't? She looked at my feet and said it looks like you've used up half your ammo, noting that I only had one shoe on. I then said my aim is impeccable, and that's how I got my stuff back.

While this was going on, the police car overheated and wouldn't start. It was in my driveway behind my car. So I got to wait for the wrecker. Still, I was only 15 minutes late for work.

I'll be gimping around for a few days, but I locked my car last night.