the curse continues

[cellio]

Sigh. It's a good thing I'm not superstitious, or right about now I'd be starting to think about replacing the cursed car.

Sometime during the 25 minutes I was at tonight's minyan, some bastard smashed the driver-side window in my car. It does not appear that he attempted to steal the stereo or the car itself (no damage to stereo or steering column). He dumped the contents of the glove box and apparently rifled through things. (For reasons unknown, he also put the visor down -- but it's a semi-porous surface so it doesn't show prints.)

This was a mysterious act of vandalism until I realized that the only thing missing was the garage-door opener.

That's very clever. Break into a car, pick up the garage-door opener, get the owner's address from the registration card, and hope for an atached garage that will let you break into the house in relative solitude later. (Open garage, walk in, close garage door behind you, work on the house lock at your leisure.) I'm surprised I thought of it mere seconds before the police officer said something.

We have a detatched garage, so about all he'll be able to steal is the sukkah and I don't think he wants that. I suppose he could also return in the dead of night to work on stealing the car; there's not much I can do about that except make sure there's nothing valuable in the car. An auto-glass service is supposed to come in the morning. Completely coincidentally, we're getting the garage-door opener replaced anyway.

I have no evidence about the car alarm. Did it sound? If it did, no one responded, but I wouldn't expect them to. And if it went off, the thief hung around for at least a bit.

Some data about the Pittsburgh police: they came about half an hour after I called; given that there was at least one robbery (armed?) and one sounded-like-mugging nearby being talked about on the radio, that's not surprising. The officer who responded was polite and professional, and he asked if I'd like them to dust for prints. (You could have knocked me over with a feather. Dust for prints? For something less severe than violence or burglary? Wow.) We found a good candidate print on the outside of the car, but when the prints folks showed up (within 15 minutes) they couldn't get anything. They did, however, sweep much of the glass off of the driver's seat for me before leaving, saving me the challenge of getting the car home unbloodied. (Yeah, it's safety glass. But there were a lot of looked-like-shards.)

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks. I am currently waiting for the glass folks to call.

The new garage door comes with new remotes that are keyed to it, so the remote turns out not to be a big deal for us. (By the way, the protocol for the police report required that I estimate the value of the stolen remote. Um, a $2 piece of plastic plus a battery? I never thought about it.)

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

"Key component of security system requiring major portions of the system to be replaced." Then you add in the price of the garage door. The idea is that when they catch this bastard, he gets charged with as much as possible.
-- Dagonell

[cellio]

I'd love it if they could nail the guy, but I don't see how they'll ever catch him without fingerprints and without something tracable having been stolen from the car.

Note, though, that you can buy a replacement remote and sync it with an existing system; you don't have to replace the whole opener in order to replace a remote. When we bought the house one of the two remotes we were given was DOA, and we went to KMart and bought a new one. You do need one remote to do this, though; if both are gone you may be hosed. Programming the new one involved some sort of signal-beaming magic involving the working one.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

I think the point wasn't the cost of replacing the new remote, but rather the cost of "rekeying" the garage door opener. Think of it like having your keys stolen. The cost of replacing a key is minimal, but the cost of rekeying the locks is ~10x as much. For security, you would really need to rekey the lock, so you set the higher price.

However, given that you were replacing the garage door opener anyway, the law may decide that you were only damaged the cost of the remote anyway. Dontcha just love PA law?

S