Yesterday, I came home from work to find my apartment had been burglarized. Gaining entrance through my sixth-floor fire escape window, which they pried open until the latch broke, they only took small things easy enough to carry back down the way they came in.
The thing is, these days it’s all the smaller things that cost so much and have so much value. They walked off with most of my voice acting recording equipment, including an audio interface and mixing board I was borrowing from a friend. Those two things alone are valued at around $1,200. They cleared out my meager gaming collection – my four-year-old Xbox One and every one of my games (all three of them!), my wireless controllers, Meta Quest 2 VR headset, the headphones for my recording computer, which they still managed to damage event though they didn’t steal the computer itself.
I called the police and over the following eight hours, different groups of detectives and fingerprinters came and went, conducting their investigation. In the end I was finally able to lay down to sleep around 9am, having been up for more than 30 hours at this point.
Peace was not to be mine, yet. Less than three hours after laying down, the building fire alarm went off, and I exited my apartment to find the door of the apartment adjacent to mine glowing orange. Smoke filled the hall and I asked the people standing around if anyone had called 9-1-1. No one had, so I did. After the firefighters arrived, a disabled child left home alone was pulled from the adjacent apartment.
Though the fire was not in my apartment, at one point the team fighting the blaze broke in my door to gain access to the adjacent walls. When they broke in my door, several inches of water that had been building up in the hall gushed into my apartment, flooding my hall, kitchen and bedroom. Firefighters then proceeded into my bedroom and smashed a three-foot hole in the wall, allowing smoke to enter my apartment and cause more damage. They accidentally knocked over my laundry bins and proceeded to trample over my clothes for more than an hour, too.
In less than 24 hours, I lost more than $3,000 worth of things. And, yes, that’s what they are: things. Stuff.
What I lost of most value was my sense of security and safety. The fire is one thing, those happen and you can prepare for those with fire extinguishers and escape plans. Burglaries, on the other hand, are violating on so many levels.
If you can help me recover, I would be so grateful. I’m ok with losing my own stuff. I have had renter’s or home owner’s insurance everywhere I’ve ever lived most of my life. I hadn’t been in this apartment for a full two months yet, and I hadn’t been able to afford insurance yet. It was actually on my to-do list for the following week, when I would receive my first full-size pay from my new job. I need to replace my friend’s borrowed equipment, mainly, which is about $1,200.
Here is the link to a GoFundMe I set up in response to some people around me wanting to help.
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