harassment

For the past year or so, we have been dealing with increasing harassment directed at our vehicles. Given our one-car driveway, one of us generally has to park on the street. Depending on which direction we come from, we often park on the street directly in front of our house (rather than parking across the street from our house), between our driveway and the tree which is ~15 feet from the fire hydrant. And given that Mike gets home before me 99% of the time, he typically takes the driveway which means I get the street.

(typically I would insert a picture here to illustrate, but it's been dark for about four hours and I can't find anything saved that demonstrates my point)

So, about a year ago I started noticing that my windshield wipers would be pulled up off my car every once in awhile. A little weird, but it was only once a month or so, so I didn't think too much of it.  But then the notes started, and the frequency increased:

Since my car was always the target, it started to feel very creepy, very fast. And the frequency increased to nearly every time that I parked on the street - multiple times per week. Yuck and EW!

After several calls to the police department, there was still not much they could do without a specific suspect. So Mike and I put on our thinking caps and came up with an idea:  given that the culprit was typically writing in the frost, s/he must be writing in the early morning (given overnight temperature patterns). And given that it only occurred on weekdays and not on weekends, it was probably not someone in the neighborhood who owned a dog and was out walking every day. And given that the handwriting looked like that of a male in later middle age (based on the baseless "science" of handwriting analysis)... Mike  hypothesized that it might be our newspaper carrier, who happens to be a man of that age, who only delivers our weekday papers, and who typically delivers our paper around 5/5:30 in the morning. Hmmm...

We started by looking at motion-activated surveillance cameras, hoping to catch him (or whoever it was) in the act, but quickly (based on pricing - $100+!) decided to rely on our own manpower instead. So last Tuesday morning I got up around 4:45am, confirmed that our paper had not yet arrived, and then spent about 30 min just staring out the window from a small crack in our curtains. Then Mike took over at 5:15 and around 6am (after I had done my morning treadmill walking routine), Mike told me that he had SEEN the paper guy writing on the car - AHA!!!!!  It was such a relief to know the identity of the person! But we still needed a plan. Should we confront him ourselves? (but what if he was violent!) Report it to the Wall Street Journal? (but we didn't want him to lose his job!) Hmmm....

We eventually decided to call the police yet again. Less than 30 min after taking the report and stating that he would follow up with us later, Officer Tony called back to say he had spoken with the suspect. Interestingly, the guy denied ever touching either of our vehicles. But he also told the officer that he had his own complaint that cars in front of our house were illegally parked too close to the hydrant, and in fact there was a complaint of his on record less than a month ago! Officer Tony said he educated the man about the actual parking laws in our city, specifically confirming that where we park is 100% legal, at which point the man reportedly became "weird and evasive" and "started changing his story." Hmmmm...

So even though he denied it, I think it is safe to say that we found the true culprit. And, interestingly, there have been no more notes on our cars since the police contacted him. Hopefully we have resolved the situation!! I am choosing to believe that he was acting out in a misdirected attempt to "help" us correct what he thought was an illegal act, but I am still glad to have an end (I hope!) to this ordeal.

Now we just have to decide if we want to give our newspaper carrier a holiday tip this year...