My 3 roommates and I, as well as the four upstair neighbors at 7th and Coles were all burglarized on Monday, August 7th. I returned home from work to find quite a few cops already searching our apartment. Someone or some people kicked in the front building door, then kicked in the 2 apartment doors. They stole laptops, ipods, cameras, check books, and thousands of dollars in jewelry. They stole my great grandmother's diamond wedding band and the jewelry our neighbor's deceased father passed down to him. They even had the nerve to drink our iced tea and leave the container in our laundry room which is why we think it was more than one person and they acted more like it was a "social event" . The school across the street caught the incident on one of their cameras. We were told today, after 2 weeks of trying to contact the head of security by phone, in person, and through the police, that the tape was recorded over...there is no longer evidence and now our case must be marked as closed. We are heartbroken and now looking to move. My roommates and I moved into this beautiful (but unsafe) apartment on June 1, 2006!

If anyone, and I know there are people (9th and Monmouth) who is also dealing with this would like to try and get to the bottom of it, please contact me. We too have reason to believe that it could be high school age kids that also hung out on our stoop. One kick to all three doors and they were in. We believe it happened sometime between 1 and 4, when they knew we would not be home and the security guards would be gone. We too are new to the neighborhood and they might have been watching us for some time to learn our likely schedules. The police are not being cooperative at all in helping us which resulted in our only hope of evidence being destroyed. We were told by the makers of the laptops with built in wireless internet that we might be able to trace where the computers are now. But since the police are refusing to help us here, we have to spend our time and what little energy we have left to investigate this ourselves. If anyone knows any information, we could get together to see if it amounts to anything and perhaps handle it ourselves. Its a shame all these things are happening in this neighborhood. Hopefully these street crimes will eventually decrease with greater police presence and/or community involvement this in these forums. Let us know if we can be of help to anyone in the neighborhood:)

One more little rant...our landlord is not doing much to create a safer apartment building...she simply attached a storm door to the outside, which we realized is a fire hazard and now needs to come down. The doors that were kicked in were nailed back to the molding, painted over, and were not supported in any way. This can happen again in this apt building. There are no bars on the windows or other security measures. Please please make sure something is being done in your apts to try to prevent this from happening!