Last week I blogged about the tires on my husband’s Explorer being punctured. Would you believe it happened again? I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen the deflated tires and surveillance video with my own eyes.
After the first incident my husband installed a camera system. So we now have actual (and extremely creepy) footage of the “perp”—hooded and gloved and efficiently puncturing the tires. We also have footage of the vehicle that slowed in front of our house Sunday morning, just hours before we discovered the hundred nails scattered at the end of our driveway. This discovery led us to believe that the nails we found a month ago did not fall off a work truck as we thought, but were the first incident in this chain of vandalism.
As the saying goes, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” With that in mind we no longer have any cars in our driveway. You would be amazed at how spending $1,000 on tires in 7 days gives you great impetus to clear out 15 years of accumulation from your storage space to make room for your vehicle.
We do have a theory on who might be doing this; obviously, I don’t think it’s somebody that reads my blog or I wouldn’t be talking about it here. We are doing some detective work (though this is a big deal to us, San Diego PD isn’t going to make it their number one priority) and when we’re finished will hand everything over to the police investigator with whom we’ve been communicating.
Interesting tidbits:
This vandalism is apparently directed not at us as people the perp really knows (because he doesn’t target other vehicles of ours parked on the street), but rather against us as the residents of this particular house.
We don’t believe it has anything to do with our kids.
Both puncturing incidents happened on Friday mornings—4:07 a.m. the second time—so we did consider the option of leaving the car out and trying to catch the person in the act. After much thoughtful consideration though, there are too many possible not-good endings in that scenario. After all, the suspect is armed with an extremely sharp weapon. And if my husband were to arm himself there’s the possibility of an altercation that ends with someone hurt or dead. No amount of money is worth that scenario.
I hope to be able to tell you how this turns out and I also hope someone will be paying us restitution.