Going beyond the pale

About two years ago, my husband and came home to police cars sitting in front of our house, cops in and around our yard and an extremely large group of people seeming to grow around the place.  It was a parents worst nightmare!  The house, I didn't care about, but the problem you see, is that we had left our youngest two children at home alone.  My heart hit the floor and panic set in!  I ran to the door and pushed past a bunch of teenagers to try and get into my house,my husband just behind me.  It seemed like hours before I made it in (I know it was only seconds, but still to this day it 'feels' like hours), I looked around my home frantically and didn't see my kids.  An officer stepped over to me.  Literally, he took just one step - again it seemed to take so long and seem to be so far to just walk the couple of steps from my door into my kitchen.  I only saw his face in a blur, I was still searching for my kids!  As he moved towards me, I saw my youngest son (then only 9) just behind the officer.  Thank God!!  Where is ... and then my daughter came out from the other room! I have never been so happy!

We had been gone only for maybe an hour and half at most.  My oldest was at school, while the other two (9 and 11 years old) were at home.  They were just starting to stay home alone once in a while, and felt so happy and grown up to be without parents! 
Cell phone? Nope!  We didn't believe in them.  Cell phones mean taking your work and other things with you when you go out and we believed in living in the moment.  So... as you can imagine, when the shit hit the fan my kids couldn't get a hold of us, of me!  We all have cell phones now, I cant believe how stupid that was!  A simple modern convenience that makes life safer for the kids, and we only thought of the inconveniences it could cause.

Anyway, while we were gone someone had come to the door and knocked several times.  The kids had been told to never open the door when we were not home, and certainly never to strangers.  The stranger at the door didn't give up, knocking and banging louder and louder.  The kids got scared and ran upstairs to my bedroom - thank god they were smart enough to grab the phone on the way!
They looked out a window from the top floor and saw a man.  They hid.  They heard glass breaking on the main floor and called 911.
They heard the man walking around the main floor and then begin up the stairs.  They tried to hide, but only found hiding space under my bed, and only room for one.  The youngest was pushed under the bed by his sister, who stood guard - phone in hand.  She told us later that if the man came into the room she thought that he would see her and not think to look under the bed where her brother was hiding, she thought this would help protect him.  Meantime her brother was so scared that he couldn't stop shaking.  He wet his pants and begged his body to stop moving, because it was making the bed shake, and this could give away his hiding place.  He was so frightened and wanted his sister to be safe too, but couldnt manage to do anything about it.  (To this day, he is still working this out and finding a way to make peace with himself and find the courage he believes he should have had.)
The man never made it up the stairs, as the police came and he ran out.  The police chased him for several blocks but he got away.
They eased my kids out of that room and downstairs, where eventually we arrived.   They explained to us what had happened, and we exhaled with such relief!  The kids were okay!  7

The police took bootprints and fingerprints and caught the guy a couple of days later.  We all felt so relieved!  That is until it happened again. And again. and again...

Over the next 12 weeks the attempts continued, sometimes several times a day - and sometimes days in between attempts.  One man, other times two or three men - from the front of the house, through the windows, often during the day and sometimes at night.

Those three months we lived in terror.  The police couldn't figure out what they wanted.  Were we involved in drugs?  Did we have firearms in the house?  Did we often have large amounts of cash in the house?  The answer was always the same 'NO'.  All the police could think of, was that there was something in our home that these guys wanted.  And not the original creep that broke in, because he was in jail.  What the hell was going on here?

We put locks on all our gates, cut away all bushes that could become hiding places for intruders, put new locks on doors, boarded up ground level windows, put in a fairly sophisticated alarm system and got a purebred watchdog.  We also got cell phones for everyone.  There were bats in every room, at night we strategically placed mats with nails sticking up, on the floors, we armed everyone with whistles and did many other 'little' things to try and keep our family safe.  What we just could not understand was why?  Why did they keep coming?  What could be so valuable or important in our home that they would want?

Most often, the people who broke in - when they made it into the house, went upstairs to the bedroom. Not 'bedrooms', but 'bedroom' the one that my youngest two children shared. We eventually caught on that they were after the kids. Why? Which one? We just couldn't figure it out. Nothing made sense.  Most of the time they broke in, or tried to break in when my husband was out.

Once he was just out  in the front of the house working on the car, when they tried breaking into the back, coming over the back fence - our dog went nuts, so I let her out of the house and she ran towards the back fence where two men were climbing over and into our yard.  The dog stood between the men and me, and barked and growled.  I saw this and ran towards them, bat in hand, yelling and screaming for them to get lost.  The men ran away, only to come back another day.
Another time, my husband had gone out to get some groceries.  He was not gone half an hour, and I looked out my bedroom window only to see a man looking in the house from the side of our garage - inside the gated area!  I got all the girls to the 'safe spot' in the house, and went back to see him sneaking across the yard towards the house.  I picked up my paintball gun and aimed.  I had to wait for him to come into range, which seemed like forever.  Finally, he walked across my view and I shot, and shot and shot and shot.  I think I must have gotten off five or six shots.  One of them hit him right in the chest. Yahoo!!! Now the police will find him easily I thought!  He fell down, and I kept shooting.  I don't know if I hit him again, my vision had become blurry and it was difficult to focus.  He ran away, and I called the police.
After that I was investigated for shooting at this man, and told that I could be brought up on charges for assault- even if he didn't press charges because the police could!
  I was shocked beyond belief.  Not only was my family being terrorized and the police seemed to be unable to help, but they were threatening to charge me for protecting my family! 

Things went on like this for about three months.  My kids became increasingly frightened, the youngest took to hiding in small things like boxes or cupboards - especially when his dad went out.
We began to sleep together in one room, the youngest two kids and I.  My oldest daughter stayed in her room.  She seemed somewhat unaffected by what was going on - and a little confused at how long the rest of us continued to feel afraid.

My husband slept in the living room.  Why?  Well, one night the kids begged him to sleep in their room with him, and so he did.  He slept on the floor, in the only available space  - a short distance from the door.  The next morning he woke up to our 11 year old crying 'Dad, there's a man in my room!" It seems that a man made it past our locked gates, through the locked door - without setting the alarm, past the motions sensors, and into the kids room.  My daughter says he stood there for a long time (probably not so long, if time moved like molasses for her the same way it had for me when I felt frightened), he just looked at her, then smiled and began to walk into the room.  She called out and my husband jumped up - the man ran out as soon as he spotted my husband.  Tom chased him out of the house and down the road, but he got away. 
It seems that our oldest daughter turned off the alarm and sensors and 'forgot' to lock the back door where he got in.  She was 17, how could she forget something like that, at at a time like this?
So, my husband began sleeping in the living room to gaurd the stairway that led to where the kids and I were sleeping.

She seemed to forget about the locks and alarms often.  I began to suspect brain damage...I am not kidding.  This is not a joke.  I began to believe that she has some sort of brain damage, or malfunction causing her to be so.. so dumb!  I was determined to get her some help, get her checked out when this was all over.  None of it seemed to be affecting her, she was the same as always except that she didn't seem to realize the importance of our families safety.  The rest of us were loosing our cool - to put it mildly.  We had been under so much stress and constant trauma that we were in shock, and living in a way that I expect many people do in third world countries where life is very difficult and very cheap.

This all came to a head one night when my husband was out walking the dog.  The kids were in bed and I was on the phone with my friend, when we both heard a couple of funny sounding 'clicks'... sounded like someone was on the phone with us.  We dismissed it as paranoia and continued talking. A few minutes later the phone line went dead. I freaked out and grabbed the closest thing I could use to defend myself - the paintball gun - and positioned myself in front of the stairs.  No One was getting up there!  No one was getting to my kids!  The alarm system was right there, and I checked it - no doors had been opened, no person had entered our house.  Now I was totally freaked.  I just stood their, defending the stairway that lead to the kids.  If I am totally honest, I think it was more fear that rooted me to that spot, than choice.  Someone banged at the door, making me jump so that the paintball gun went off!  I heard my girlfriend calling to me, and so I let her into the house.  We quickly made a plan.  She went upstairs to get the kids, and took them into her car, while I defended the stair case until they got out of the house.  It sounds stupid now, but at the time all I could think of was that the stairways was the place that i had to make sure the intruders didn't cross if I wanted to be sure to keep my kids safe.

Tom came home.  He checked the whole house, and no one was in it.  Not a soul.  The only problem seemed to be that the phone cord had been cut, in the kitchen.  Someone had cut the phone cord! Someone had been in our house! They got past the alarm!  It was the most frightening moment of all!  Slowly it began to dawn on us that no one had entered our house.  No one had been hiding in our house.  It had to be someone already there.  It had to be one of us.
My legs gave out, my stomach churned, my head hurt.  I thought I might throw up.  Who knows, maybe I did ... I don't remember.  In one swooping moment my world came crashing down.  There was only one person who could have possibly done this.  Only one person who could have gotten past me to cut the Cord and get back upstairs without me seeing.I wouldn't let myself believe it or even   think about it.  "I cannot think about this!  I cant talk about!  We made a mistake, the cord must have torn". 

We didn't discuss what we knew, but somehow found a way to stuff it way down.  That was a mistake.