I feel so so so so guilty.

And I’m not going to include any photos on this post for safety reasons, and I’ll tell you why.

So Thursday night, I fell asleep around midnight.  I honestly felt like I may have been asleep for 15 or 20 minutes when I heard someone pounding loudly on the door of the girls who live below me.  I was confused, and sleepy, and assumed that the girls were throwing a party and someone got locked out.  But as the pounding continued, and Coco started getting riled up, I kind of started getting the sense that something wasn’t right.

And then the pounding stopped.

Suddenly, flashlights started coming through my window on the second floor, and I realized that something that was going on over this period of about 15 minutes that wasn’t as simple as the girls downstairs throwing a loud party.  I peeked downstairs, and saw that two Raleigh Police Officers were climbing up on the porch, and it appeared that a kid, probably my age, had broken into the apartment downstairs.

The next day, when I went down to speak to the girls, one of the women told me that she had met the kid a week earlier and had gone on one date with him.   ONE.  He’d wanted to come over on Thursday night, and she said that she was sleeping.  He came over, pounded on the door for a while, and when the girls refused to answer, they thought he left, when in reality, he went around the back of our building, scaled the porch (about 10 feet in the air), and found an unlocked door or window.  He broke in, and began pacing the apartment while the girls cowered in a closet on dispatch with 911.

As the girls were hiding in the closet, the kid began to pull on the closet door as an attempt to get at them.  He only stopped when he heard the footfalls of the police, and ran to hide underneath the sheets in one of the rooms.  The police were able to locate him, arrested him, and charged him with a breaking and entering.

Looking back, I feel horribly guilty that I didn’t investigate the weirdness going on downstairs further.  All I could replay over and over was if he had managed to hurt the girls before the police arrived.

And it brings me to this.

If you hear something, do something.  Had something worse happened to those poor girls, I could have never lived with myself.  So ladies, protect yourselves.  Lock your doors, meet the new dates in public places, let someone know where you are and PLEASE, once again, if you hear something, say something.