Today at 2:43pm, somebody attempted to break into my house. They used a prybar of some sort to pry open the patio door. They never actually made it into the house, fortunately. They never even got the door open completely, before the attempt set off the alarm. It appears from the tracks in the snow that the culprit took off through the bush behind my house, and jumped the fence into the neighbouring strip-mall.

I got the call from my alarm monitoring company a few minutes after the attempt. Drove home to check it out, found no evidence that the culprit(s) ever set foot in the house. They did, unfortunately, do a fair bit of damage to the patio door, which I now must replace.

There were footprints all around the house, suggesting that they had looked in the windows to see if anyone was home. I think the shoe size seems somewhat small… maybe a young punk kid.

I called the police almost immediately when I got home. An officer arrived very quickly indeed (I was impressed), checking for any obvious evidence. Another officer looked around the neighbourhood, following the direction of the snow tracks, looking for any suspicious characters with crowbars. As one might expect, nothing particularly useful was discovered.

This follows a series of incidents with my alarm, but none of the previous incidents can be conclusively identified as being an actual break-in attempt. There were definite problems with the alarm wiring for a while, which have been fixed now, but they did cause quite a few false-alarms.

And then there were two incidents where I came home to investigate an alarm, and found outside doors open. In those cases, there was no evidence of force, or that anyone had been there. The doors could have been left ajar, and blown open in the wind. Or, it could have been somebody somehow had a copy of the key, and kept trying the doors, hoping that maybe I forgot to arm the alarm that day. After the second such incident, just to be safe, I had all the locks rekeyed. A couple weeks ago, I glimpsed somebody outside walking past a window (could have been the neighbour, I don’t know.) And now, this.

What does it all mean? The previous incidents may have been nothing. Or is my house, for some reason, a popular target for random burglary attempts? Or is there one particular very determined burglar who keeps trying to get into my house? If so, why my house specifically? He would know I have an alarm now, why would he keep coming back?

The only way I know to lay these questions to rest is to get some kind of video surveillance going. Weird that I would be considering this, when so recently I was roasting the X-10 company over the silliness of their wireless spy cameras for “home security”. But I am considering options…