It all started in the year 2000 to 2006. We were unlucky enough to experience a long string of burglaries, break-ins and thefts. Vancouver is so beautiful and the climate is mild. We really don’t have any winters; a couple of months of heavy rain and that’s about the extent of our winters. This climate is perfect for every homeless drug addict from all across Canada to meander over here because they can survive the winters on the streets. Where there is addiction and poverty there is crime.
We had a small gallery which had been broken into one night. All the art was stolen. We felt like we had been a bit naïve because we didn’t have an alarm system set up. So we got our act together and had a security system installed. A few months went by and we were broken into again. The criminals actually snipped the wires and stole the alarm system (talk about desperate!)
In the following years only some minor incidents. Cars that were dumped behind the garage or in front of the house, and sure enough when I phoned the police the cars had been reported stolen. My husband finished work one day and went down to the car lot, only to find his car had been stolen. One other fine day he discovered that his new lap top had been stolen out of the office in broad daylight!
In 2002 one morning I woke up and came down to the kitchen, making coffee and getting ready for the day. All of sudden I noticed that the security bars on the outside of the kitchen window were hanging at an angle. We quickly went out on the deck; sure enough someone had patiently removed all the screws of the security bars and had managed to open the kitchen window. They got away with a cell phone and a briefcase which was always on the floor near the kitchen window. We called the police and when they arrived we noticed that a large kitchen knife was missing; so they must have heard one of us wake up to go to the bathroom. That really scared me when I saw that knife missing. I was upset about the stolen briefcase because it contained hundreds of dollars worth of watercolors and inks! I went to the front yard and to my pleasant surprise the creeps had opened the briefcase and then dumped the whole thing and the watercolors into the hedges!! Little did they know that one tiny tube is 15 dollars!
By this time I was getting really annoyed and fed up with all the criminal activity. We moved again and we figured it would be safer to have the security bars on the inside of the window. A few quiet months went by in the new house in a good neighborhood. One day I came home from work around noon. I heard some strange sounds before I even opened the door; I assumed it was the cleaning lady. I opened the door and walked right into a burglary.(He had kicked the basement door down) I didn’t know what was going on and by the time my brain registered everything the creep was one inch away from me. I think my height (I’m 5’10’’) gave me the courage to talk to him like a naughty child. I just looked at him and said” Oh my God, you better get out of here!” Of course I was in shock for quite sometime after that and I will never let a strange man in the house. The creep had left a drug syringe on the kitchen floor which the police picked up with her bare hands. The best piece of evidence was destroyed.
Well, since then we moved again! We have a lot of traffic and we also have a bus stop right behind our house. I think all the traffic keeps the criminals away!
My website is www.labedzki-art.com
