((((((itself))))))

I'm so sorry this happened to you, and thankfully you and Laurie are safe and were not home when it happened. I know how terrifying and violating it is and I wish there was something I could do to help you out. All I can really provide now is some experience and a tiny bit of advice.

Two of my houses were robbed so far. And both were robbed during the day, too. When I was in 5th grade my Dad and I came home from school and when he opened the door I could see our house had been torn apart. I vividly remember him running me back to the car, throwing me in, locking the doors, and telling me to hide until he came back.

We found out later that they had broken in through my room. We had a huge wrap-around deck so it was very easy for them. Two men, one woman. One had cut his/her hand and there was blood everywhere, apparently. My room was the least destroyed, there wasn't anything valuable in a little girl's room. One of the neighbors saw them walking up our driveway and thought they were coming to view our house because it was up for sale. (Which makes no logical sense considering you could not park on our road and our driveway was a really long hill.) They were drug addicts and needed money. Eventually the police caught them but everything was already sold. The worst was my Mom losing all her jewelry that had been passed down by family.

To this day I'm very uncomfortable sleeping on the ground floor and will avoid it as much as possible. We installed an alarm at all our houses after that and took measures to make it less thief-friendly. I think a big thing is just getting over that violation of privacy and learning to feel safe again.

This is getting long, but when I was in university it happened again to me and my friends. We were all gone over reading week and they broke in through my friend's window on the ground floor. They took all of his CDs and broke into all of our rooms, but nothing else. It was really weird. I remember being shaken up by it when we all came back from vacation and learned what happened. I went to bed that night and got this really strong feeling to look under my bed. Sure enough the huge kitchen knife they'd used to break all our doors open was under my bed. I was a little freaked out to say the least.

So the only advice I can really give is to, if you haven't already, have valuables (esp jewelry) appraised if needed, take pictures of the valuables in your house, and put the pics in the safe deposit box. Let the police do their work, sometimes they find who did it, sometimes they don't. Do some research to see what you can do to make your house safer, there's more to it than just alarms, I think. Maybe someone else will have advice on that. You're doing a great job at getting neighbors together to work on a neighborhood watch, too.

And maybe most importantly, give yourself some time to sort of grieve about what happened. And even though the experience might change you (like me being afraid of sleeping on the ground floor), know that you can and will feel safe again with time. And now you're being more proactive in that safety. Take care of yourself. I hope at the very least it helps know that others have gone through this, understand how you're feeling, and are here for you if you want to talk about it.