The funny thing is that it's in the Red States, where this sort of stuff doesn't happen, that people sleep with guns under their pillows.
Actually, I'm sort of talking out of my ass. I have no idea whether new yorkers sleep with guns under their pillows.
Its very scary. This is why I fear real cities.
Yeah, I so did not need to hear that. I've convinced all of my relatives (and myself) that those types of events are a thing of the past.
Usually I'm the first one to throw my hands in the air and exclaim "NYC is edgy again! Hurray!" when I hear about something seedy happening in the city but a guy breaking into my apartment? Over the edge.
Breaking in in the middle of the night is extra scary; it makes me wonder if he was there to take stuff or to assault someone. Luckily, Ex can do a deep, loud yell, and I wouldn't be surprised if the guy thought there was a man he wasn't expecting in the apartment.
If she pulled off a deep, loud yell in that situation, I'm impressed. I think even many a macho man would scream like a girl under those circumstances.
I agree. She did good. She's typically not one to cower, and now we know not atypically either.
When I was living in a basement apartment in college, I woke up to find the screen off one of the windows and the VCR gone. Somebody had come in while my girlfriend and I were asleep, took the one cheap-ass piece of electronics in the place, then walked out the front door.
I guess that's a whole lot less threatening than waking up and seeing somebody there.
Because somehow, no matter how strapping a fellow you might be, it would be twice as hard to subdue an intruder if you were buck naked.
I might be more freaked out by sleeping through it. I'd like to think that I could at least give myself a fighting chance by waking up.
About a year ago, a friend of mine got his appartment virtually cleaned out while he was asleep. They took his car too, which he later happened upon and took it back.
It's not just cities. Last year there was a spate of incidents here in this small college town of a man entering girls' apartments while they slept and doing various creepy things. The police eventually arrested a guy, who confessed to something (not clear what) but then fled. As far as I know he's still on the lam.
A while back, there was a case of a guy sneaking into girls' appartments around here and getting into bed with them or watching them sleep. He didn't do anything else. By all reports he acted very naturally about it, or was apologetic, and was always non-threatening. He was eventually caught.
The story strikes me as terrifying, for the reasons in #4. A not small part of it is that Ex is a woman; I'd be freaked if it happened to me, but I feel like I would have fewer worries than if I were a woman.
Jeebus.
I was staying at a friend's house in ann arbor, got up in the middle of the night and walked downstairs in a t-shirt to find a strange man in the hall. I was half-asleep so I just said "who are you looking for?" and he said "oh, um, I, uh, wrong house..." and ran out the front door. So then I woke up completely and was too nervous to go down the hall and lock the door without company. Shared student housing--No one took security real seriously. Til then.
Wow, this seems to be pretty common in college towns. I guess they're easy targets for creeps like this.
My parents went to college in Illinois during the age of the Enema Bandit. She says that the campus was taken over with practically Son-of-Sam-level hysteria.
Yeah, when I googled for a link, all I kept getting at first were Zappa lyrics pages. For a second, I started to wonder if my mother had been lying to me all of these years. But, nope, it's real.
My parents went to college in Illinois during the age of the Enema Bandit. She says that the campus was taken over with practically Son-of-Sam-level hysteria.
Understandably so. Imagine being known to one's neighbors as a victim of the EB. You'd have to go start a new life under an assumed name. The sort of thing that would make you lock your doors, all right.
Good for Ex on the yell. That's hard to do. I'm a pretty composed person, not easily scared or squeamish and generally sort of tough, but when really freaky stuff like that has happened to me, I just kind of stand there silently, frozen for a while.
Agh. Scary.
There is a man in my town who is breaking into apartments and raping women. He has been doing it for years and has not been caught. It doesn't seem much of a priority for the cops.
I have a big dog and take pains to tell people who ask she doesn't like strangers. It's all I can do, other than keeping the windows and doors locked at all times.
Earlier this summer, July maybe, some guy was breaking into upper-story apartments on the Upper East and West Sides, around the 80s. He raped the female tenants and *then* took their stuff. I hope your ex's "extra-double secured" windows near the fire escapes have lockable metal grills and that she remembers that the default is closed and locked. (They're so ugly that you really have to train yourself into thinking the windows look weird when the grills aren't closed.)
I'm impressed that she seems composed--but then a good girlfriend of mine was nearly raped at knifepoint and rebounded from it much better than I did, hearing about it.
That happened to my sister in Somerville, although in that case it sounded like the guy kind of knew her roommate and was looking for drugs. The roommate was a part-time bounccer at a local club.
The guy stole her cell phone after she had barred the door to her bedroom with furniture. That made calling the police difficult. I told her she should have called them sooner.
What really bothered her, though, was that she could hear the people moving around downstairs, and nobody came when she screamed at the top of her lungs.
24: winna, to cast you a line of hope, it is possible that the police are taking it very seriously, but have decided for the moment that not speaking too much about it publicly is the best strategy for catching the guy.
26: good lord, that's awful, and I do mean the part about the neighbors. I check on my neighbors even in case of suspicios noises. But, I tend to live in duplexes and such, which may well be different from a large appt complex, if that was the type of place she was living.
The tip I've heard about screaming for help is to yell "Fire!" That you're being attacked is not your neighbor's problem -- that the building is burning is. I have no idea whether this works in practice.
And poor ex, and good for her on yelling -- my apartment was burgled once in the early 90's, luckily while I wasn't home, and I was surprised by how frightened I was by the experience. (The police who showed up were entirely not reassuring -- they were very clear that they only purpose they served was to produce a police report so my insurance/the IRS would believe that I had been robbed.)
The worry went away fairly quickly though, and certainly didn't drive me away from the city. In my case, I think it's because I've always lived in a city, and houses scare me a little -- the idea of all of those windows at ground level, and no one in the next apartment to help. This isn't any more rational than being scared of the city, but it kept the burglary-related worry from getting too bad.
What Becks said about so not needing to hear this.
The neighbors your sister could hear moving around downstairs even while she was screaming for help are horrible, bg. They could have at least called the police without involving themselves further.
I wouldn't really want to live in a suburban house, either. I know plenty of stories about women who were attacked in their nice little tract homes. After a while you just do everything you can think of to be safe and trust the rest to luck.
Lots of friends have similar scary stories to those listed above.
Worst that ever happened to me was some guys walked into the student housing I lived in and walked out with all the electrical appliances in our kitchen. This was due largely to dumb-assery on the part of one of my flatmates who totally failed to ask the dodgy looking guys without ID why they were removing the gear.
FWIW, I've always found cities safer than small towns. But maybe that's not typical. Small towns you are perhaps less likely to be robbed, but they certainly don't seem less violent than cities in my experience.
Of course if you believe recent surveys I grew up in the 'most violent country in the developed world' ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4257966.stm
We don't need to click the survey; it's common knowledge how violent you Scotts are.
And no, I'm not going to step outside with you.
ogged, glad to hear Ex was able to scare the guy off and is okay.
Hey, it's creepy story time!
This sounds like it should be the tag line of a children's show hosted by Dave Chappelle
The neighbors who didn't intervene were not necessarily horrible people who wouldn't exert themselves for anyone else's welfare. Bystander Effect / Pluralistic Ignorance
Michael:
We prefer to interpret it as a case of the rest of the world being pathetic pussies, rather than us being particularly violent. It's all about the perspective.
[On the serious side, the accent can help when people are giving you shit when you are in London or other effete southern locations... ]
Wow. Just this Saturday night something weird happened. (true story).
Performing "Urinetown" there are a couple times when cast members have to exit the theatre, walk through a parking lot, alley, and come up the back steps for their next entrance. It is poor theatre design but it is an old building and there is nothing they can do about it.
Well I play a cop with a pretty darn good costume, and I've got only one time in the show when I make that cross.
Saturday night, about 9 PM, when making that cross I come around the corner to the alley and there is our ingenue actress getting hassled by some guy. He had stepped out of an alley doorway and was "talking" to her, following her. When he saw me he took off pretty fast. I'm 6'1" in the cop shoes and the costume came from our police department.
She was less rattled than I would have been in her shoes, but I've got a pretty strong spidey sense honed from delivering pizzas near Chicago.
Obviously no one in the show will be making that cross alone in the future.
"In the grand scheme of city crime, this isn't even a blip, but it's not hard to imagine that, for a lot of people, it would be enough to drive them from the city, or even cities generally."
Fortunately, it's particularly hard to break into rural dwellings, and help is even closer to hand.
So that would be rational.