by Nouri Arif

Created on: June 17, 2007

Charlotte, North Carolina, 2001: Career detective outsmarted by a fifteen year old burglar. It happened. It's a true story. Names are being with held to protect the truly stupid.

One summer afternoon while the people that lived there were out earning their living and the one child was safely in day care the next door neighbor's fifteen year old child, who had watched the new neighbor's move in just a week before, decided to use the attic crawl space to gain entrance to his new neighbor's apartment. He crawled in through the entrance in the ceiling of the guest bedroom closet and ransacked the apartment for hours. He wasn't ever disturbed as he went about stealing from the people he'd never met as he had bypassed the alarm system that only monitored the opening of the front door of the second story apartment.

Later, when the people who'd just moved in returned, they found the place devoid of some of their most valuable possessions and there was no sign of forced entry. The apartment complex management had assured them that no attic crawl space existed as above their heads and unseen by anyone the attic space had been walled off from neighboring apartments. This left the people that lived there with only one obvious conclusion; whoever robbed them must have had a key to the place and the alarm code. This was also the opinion of the police when they arrived and heard the story these people had to tell and after they had contacted the alarm company to discover that no alarms had been triggered that day.

This all led the police to question not only the maintenance crew of the complex, but the neighbors as well. The maintenance people were asked if they were in any way involved and their individual backgrounds were checked. The neighbors were asked if they had heard or seen anything "strange" during the course of the day and all, including the fifteen year old boy next door, said they had not. Later, as it must have been a busy day, the C.S.I. woman arrived to search for finger prints. She wasn't able to lift any that would help out and after a bit of poking around the place the man that lived there noticed that she had a very small frame. On a whim he asked her, as she was a small woman, if she might squeeze trough the entrance to the crawl space and see if the attic had been walled off or not. She agreed and with a leg up she popped right through the opening in the guest bedroom closet. She discovered that there was no wall between the apartment in question and

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