To the thief who robbed our apartment last night,

 

Above is a picture of the people who you stole $5,000 worth of stuff from. I hope you needed it to eat or to help your family. If you blew it all in one night on drugs, alcohol, or anything else, I guess that’s fine too, because the police have made it pretty clear we’re unlikely to get our stuff back, so at least one of us is happy.

I just wish you hadn’t taken the computer sitting on the dining room table. It belonged to my boyfriend, Alex, and was the first thing I immediately noticed missing when I walked into the apartment. We moved into this apartment together (my first time ever living alone with a partner) so he could go to college. He bought it through the school with all of the (very expensive) programs he would need installed on it. Apparently that didn’t include insurance of any kind. The other stuff sucks, and it hurt to see clothes tossed from dressers and the bags and cases that you carelessly threw about the room like a dog getting into a trashcan, but this is by far the worst, both because of the expense and because of how important that computer was to his education.

You probably chose this building because you knew students lived in the area. If you knew anything about this particular building, you would know that there are families with young children living here. One lives right upstairs with an infant daughter. I’m thankful it wasn’t them.

I’m also thankful we weren’t here, though I keep wishing I had been, so maybe you would have seen the lights on and just kept walking by. As long as we have each other, we’ll make it, but we don’t know how to be ok right now. To say we’re shaken by this is an understatement.

Though I doubt you’ll ever read this, I hope that someone else who happens to see this letter will take the precaution to lock their windows and properly secure them with pins, nails, or bars to keep them from being forced open like ours was. I hope that this keeps them from being your next victim. And though I still want to yell and scream, though I keep imagining the scenarios of what could have been, though I would love the opportunity to throw you to the ground and beat the living daylights out of you to stop you from ever wanting to come uninvited into our home again, I hope that you find a way beyond this and do something good for someone. I hope that you take a second to think about how this affects people. Even though we’ll eventually have enough money to replace everything you stole, no amount of material goods can make up for the feelings of violation, betrayal, and lack of safety we’re currently going through.

Though we lost a lot of our things, all I want is my boyfriend’s laptop back. I’ve called all of the pawn shops I could find the phone numbers for and so far they’ve been about as sympathetic as the police. I keep hoping somebody will call us to say they’ve found one that matches the serial number but there’s nothing to guarantee that they will.

I’ve started a fund to raise money to buy him a new one. If anyone reading this has even a dollar to spare today, please consider donating it. We want to move on from this, and him having the ability to continue with school as normal as possible well help that tremendously. Anything beyond the cost of that will be donated to other victims of burglary. If you can’t donate, please share this so that others will not be victims of the same thing. No matter how safe you think you are, there are always more precautions you can take.

I don’t know who you are, what your story is, or how you can even begin to justify breaking into someone else’s home, but I beg that you never do this to someone again. And to those of you reading this, I pray that it never happens to you.

 

Sincerely,

Missing more than just our things