So I come home from work today and my front door was unlocked. Weird. My room mates weren’t home. I open my door to see my living room a wreck. My 42 inch HDTV is missing from it’s TV stand. My room mate’s Xbox 360 is missing. I immediately go into a blind rage.



I live in a bad part of Austin, TX and I should have known it would happen. We’re a group of 3 post-college aged people living in a very poor neighborhood. All of our money goes towards video games, electronics, and computers so we have a lot of stuff in our house that is easily spotted as a high-ticket item by thieves.

I call my room mate as soon as I can think about anything other than shooting some one in the face (no, I don’t own a gun just because I live in Texas, but I might get one now). He’s in utter shock and he asks about how the thieves got in. I can’t see any visible entry points and I check all the rooms in the house. In his bedroom, one of the windows is completely opened up and broken.



His HDTV in there is missing along with his girlfriend’s laptop. (We later found out that his fighting game arcade stick was also missing). It seems that the thieves entered through his bedroom, stole the TV and laptop from that room and then on their way out the front door, they spotted my TV, my room mate’s 360 and his arcade stick, and decided to take those too.

Thankfully my PS3 and Wii weren't taken. None of the games for any system were taken either.

When I could finally collect myself enough to talk calmly, I called the police who just basically wrote down a list of all the things that were missing and said they’d send out a cop to dust for fingerprints. Four hours later, the cop finally shows up and basically says that we’re screwed unless we can find the TV ourselves at a pawnshop.

We have renter’s insurance so hopefully we’ll get everything back. But we’re going to try to move out of this neighborhood as soon as possible. I recommend that anyone reading this evaluate their security set up. I thought I’d be fine just because we’re quiet and keep to ourselves but apparently thieves will strike anywhere they think it’s a weak target. Have you ever been robbed? And did you find your stuff or get insurance to cover it?