So I went home this weekend for a friend’s wedding. Last night (Sunday), I went to bed early to drive back to my apartment this morning. Around 11:15, my mom gets woken up by our dog barking, and a few minutes later I get up when I hear her walking around. Anyway, our local police department had two cars on the side street by our house, lights flashing, with a guy in handcuffs. We assume it’s a drunk local idiot from down the street, since there was a high school football game earlier in the day and he has a kid on the team. I then go look out the front window of the house and see a police car from the neighboring town as well as two NY State Trooper cars, all with lights flashing. At this point, my mom sees two cops walking down the side street gesturing towards our garage (it’s a one car garage and semi-attached to the house). Naturally, things get a little anxious, especially after we then see my younger brother (he’s 23) walk out of the garage talking to the cops.

Obviously, we need to go see what was going on. Apparently, a little while earlier, another neighbor of ours had called the police after he saw a guy walking down our side street and looking in our garage windows. After the local police came, my younger brother went down through the garage to talk to them and another neighbor, who was also talking to the cops. The police proceed to ask my brother if he had seen anyone suspicious in the neighborhood. He looks around for a few seconds, points underneath the car parked in the garage, and asks “Is this him?” The guy was lying down under our car in the garage, inches from police – he’d gotten into our garage via a back door. My brother had literally walked right past him hiding under the car to get to the police.

The police pull their guns and yell “FREEZE!” Guy comes out without a fight. My brother, now looking around the garage, finds a fairly large knife underneath our kayak a few feet away from the car. Now, he’s a fairly big guy – 6’7”, 240 lbs, and even he is a little scared knowing that he was inches away from this fugitive hiding under our car in the dark. State troopers get called, apparently the guy was wanted for stealing a few cars in Utica, about twenty minutes away, and had last been seen about ten miles north of our house on a state highway driving a stolen car.

The kicker, though, is that my dad works for the county department of mental health and frequently has to talk to new inmates at the local jail who are threatening to kill themselves. First thing this morning, he gets a call from this same guy who had broken into our garage that night carrying a knife. Needless to say, he wanted nothing to do with him, both out of disregard for his safety as well as conflict of interest.