Woke up a little groggy on Saturday morning, having stayed up late to watch the Mets lose in extra innings. When Jose, the Executive Director at Bronx AIDS Services, called me at 7:30 I had yet to consume a needed cup of coffee or even attempt to communicate in full sentences. When I heard his voice on my cellphone, my brain couldn't even compute that it was him calling. "Why is Jose calling me, at 7:30 am, on a Saturday morning?" This three-part question could have been answered rather immediately had I been listening to him and not groggily formulating that three-part question in my mind. Gradually, I regained communication cognizance, I understood him to be telling me that someone had broken into the BAS offices and had done a number on the legal department.
Hey, that's my department. My pride and joy. My homely home away from home.
I showered, brewed that much-needed cup of coffee and jumped in the car...zoom to the office.
BAS "main office" is at 540 East Fordham Road. It's a busy road, even by urban standards. Our offices are on the second floor of a two-story building. The legal department occupies the eastern side of the street-facing portion of the building. We have four windowed-offices, with the secretary/senior paralegal office at the easternmost end, then a pair of two-attorney offices, and then there's my office. Opposite these offices, in the interior of the building, is an alcove where our two other paralegals sit.
My would-be burglar entered BAS through one of the windows in the secretary/senior paralegal office via a glass-smashing crowbar. He proceeded to spend some time trying to get into our safe - he managed to break off the door handle and the number-dial thing, but couldn't get the door open. Not sure how we're going to get that door open now, but I suppose that's for the locksmith to figure out. Burglar dude then played around with the computers in the office, knocking them over to see what he could easily transport out of the place I suppose. He rifled through cabinet drawers, spilling all sorts of paperwork on the floor, looking for items of the value (none to be found). I imagine he was in that office for a good 10 - 15 minutes or so, before heading out into the hallway at around 4:15 am. That's when the motion-sensor alarm system discovered him.
Not sure when he decided to fnd the alarm keypad and smash it off the wall, but I suspect it was soon after the alarm went off. He then (or before then) went into the two attorney offices and tried dismantling the computers. He made some more of a mess as he continued his search for valuables. In the third office, he actually took a pair of scissors and cut the cords that connect the monitors to the computers. He then wrapped the two monitors in that office in a brown hooded-sweatjacket and took them into the secretary/senior paralegal office. That's where we found them.
He then probably headed down to my office, stopping at the supply cabinet outside my office where he rifled through the supplies, spilling many of them onto the floor. In my office, he took almost all of the loose change I keep in a dish on my desk (hey, how the hell am I going to pay for that afternoon package of Skittles, asshole!), and he opened a cabinet where I keep all of my funding binders (the government contracts, correspondence, data reports). These binders have often given me the urge to want to flee the building, but I bet that it was right around this time that the cop cars, responding to the triggered alarm system, finally appeared, because lame-ass burglar dude bolted out of the legal area towards the back of the agency, where he escaped via a roof hatch in the ceiling. I've worked in that office for seven years and never knew that there was a roof hatch.
Well, when I arrived at the office at around 8:30 am on Saturday, surveying all of the damage was a bit shocking. Here's a tip for all of you asiring legal directors out there: staring at a ransacked office is about the only time that it is OK to say "that dirty motherfucker" in front of your executive director.
The good news is that, with the exception of about three dollars in loose change from my office, it does not appear that he got away with anything. Some of our computers might be damaged (at the very least we've lost those two monitors), but insurance will cover that kind of loss, and all of our data/records are on a network so the hardware is completely fungible. He made a mess, particularly in the secretary/senior paralegal office, but clean-up should not take much more than an hour or two on Tuesday morning. Bozo the burglar left behind his sweatjacket (duh) and no doubt a bunch of fingerprints, so I'm optimistic that the police have something to work with. And we have a good story to tell.
Everything that you always wanted me to blog about, but were afraid to ask.
2 comments:
Whoah! If this were a John Grisham novel there would be a single missing file from a little-noticed drawer someplace, and the rest would have been done to cover his tracks....
Yes, and there'd be mediocre prose that was paced at a heart-stimulating rate. Grisham's characters, however, never have to spend an hour cleaning their deskstops of a thick layer of fingerprinting powder. My office was in worse shape when I returned to it Tuesday morning then when I saw it on Saturday. sigh. That's high drama for you.
Post a Comment