Eerie Crime

About four months before I moved out of 1444 Broadway, around March of 1991, I was heading home after visiting my mother. It was an unseasonably warm night for March, so walking home was a pleasure. It was about a quarter to eleven at night, and I planned to stop at home long enough to check my mail, change clothes, and head back out.

I turned onto Broadway at about Fourteenth Street, heading for my building near Fifteenth, when I noticed two police cruisers in front of the place. My apartment had been broken into twice in the past, so I quickened my pace, and approached one of the officers, whom I knew. He was standing by the front door of the TV repair shop on the first floor, which was gaping open.

Officer S____ asked me how long the shop had been closed; I told him a little over two years at that point, since the owner, my landlord, had been placed in a nursing home and died. His son had been there since, but that had been several months previous. By this time, we'd entered the shop, and I looked around-nothing seemed any different from when I'd last been inside, except for two sets of footprints in the dust, belonging to the other two officers, who'd found the store open. Everything the owner had left behind was, as far as I could tell, still in place, covered with dust.

The officer then asked me if I knew of any entrances to the shop other than the front one and the two in the rear, which I answered in the negative... There was a door directly in the back, and a rear door leading from outside to the basement. We checked these, and found them both chained shut and padlocked, the chains festooned with cobwebs.

Officer S____said to me, "I hate these weird ones; how'ya going to write 'em up?", as he gestured to the open front door with his flashlight, the door that was plainly broken... From the INSIDE.