A few nights ago, as Peter and I were going to bed, I looked out the window and saw two guys with hoodies and flashlights dipping in and out of a car in the dark. It looked suspicious, particularly since the video we have of my car being burgled in May featured a guy in a hoodie working with a flashlight and moving carefully so as not to set off the security lights.
We called the police, and with Peter’s powerful binoculars, kept looking at the figures in the dark. Meanwhile, a guy came out of a house closer to us and started looking through stuff in a truck bed in the driveway. He didn’t seem alarmed by the action 3 doors away, so either our call was a false alarm; he was somehow associated; or, more than likely, he couldn’t see what we were seeing from our second story vantage point.
The police arrived fairly quickly, and since we weren’t able to give them a clear address, they first drove up to talk to the guy looking through the truck. I ran out and told the police officer the activity we were calling about was actually down the street, and he walked over there, and I went back into the house.
As it turned out, the guys with the flashlights were the homeowners working on their car in the dark, but luckily for neighborhood harmony, they weren’t mad: in fact, they’d heard about the boogeyman Andrew Clark Bergman, too, so they were grateful for the nosy paranoid neighbors.
A second policeman arrived, and, to everyone’s surprise, the guy at the truck freaked out and jumped over a fence (not of the house he’d come out of.) No one was more surprised that the owner of said house, who grabbed a baseball bat and chased the guy right back out, straight into the policemen who were right on the scene.
As it turned out, the guy at the truck was a fugitive with 3 arrest warrants on him, who was hiding out at his mom’s house. The police frisked him and pulled out a wallet bulging with other people’s credit cards. He claimed he’d just found them, but that was an awful lot of credit cards to have just found, much less carry around in one’s wallet.
By this time, Peter and I were back out of the house, and we had a veritable neighborhood mini-party going on, with the fugitive as our major entertainment. The fugitive’s mom said he’d run away from rehab, which she was paying thousands of dollars for. We all agreed the fugitive was mightily lucky that he’d jumped into the backyard of a neighbor wielding a baseball bat, rather than a gun. In fact, one of the policemen informed us, there’d recently been just such an incident with a fugitive who met the wrong end of a shotgun as he ran into the wrong backyard fleeing the police.
In the end, all was well, and the fugitive got a car ride to the county jail. Now he’s well known, so maybe his mom’s place is no longer such a good hiding spot. On the other had, I fear, that like Andrew Clark Bergman, he won’t be staying in jail for long, and he’ll soon be “finding” more credit cards to fuel his addictions.