DUN! DUN!

Saturday night at 7:07 PM a guy walked up to my front door and knocked four times. Seems normal enough. Only this guy was holding a fire extinguisher and had several other guys with him carrying skateboards.

Moments after knocking on my door, perhaps timing out how long it would take for me to open it, this guy starts up the fire extinguisher, spraying the entire front of my house. I didn’t see any of this as it happened. At the time, I thought the cloudy air was either smoke or steam from my clothes dryer vent.

As I step out onto the front step my neighbor shares that he caught them on camera adding that these guys have been attacking homes and cars with the fire extinguisher up and down the street. Luckily his spotlight scared them off from my place but not before my home security camera caught them in the act.

I immediately uploaded the video to our neighborhood watch Facebook pages. Not more than five minutes later I had neighbors in their cars patroling the area looking for the guy. That’s awesome.

Ready for a plot twist? The fire extinguisher appears to be the one that was stolen from one my of neighbor’s vans earlier in the weekend. At the time they had no suspect for the break-in but now we have what appears to be one of the stolen items and its thief red-handed as he showers my house, and others’, with the powdering monoammonium phosphate. What’s more? After seeing my post on the my neighborhood’s Amateur Neighborhood Watch Facebook page, another neighbor shared with me that he found the fire extinguisher!

So I have video of a guy who attacked my house with what appears to be a stolen fire extinguisher and now I even have the fire extinguisher he used. The next step for me is to drop both of these, along with my full statement, with the detective assigned to the case.

While this whole situation totally sucks (and partly because it isn’t the first time I’ve had people come up to my house at night in a questionable manner) it’s really awesome to see neighbors banding together to not only support each other through these types of situations but also standing up and providing real assistance in catching the bad guys.

Here are two other occasions caught on camera. The first time it was two dudes who picked up a community newspaper from my driveway, banged on my door and ran.

The second time it was two kids doing a simple “ding, dong and dash” which is a prank I was totally unaware of until this happened.

I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on how this goes down. Hopefully justice will be served, in the meantime I’ll be sure to keep you all updated and I’ll be stepping up my home security a bit more. No need to make them feel like they can get away with this nonesense!

One of the most annoying parts of all this is the required cleanup. The dust from the extinguisher not only coated my flower beds and the entire front of my house, it made it into my living room through my mail box slot and from when we opened the door to see what was going on. What a mess…