Update: Police in our backyard

The police came knocking on our door a few minutes after our neighbor warned us about the man hopping fences, asking permission to search our backyard. I said, "Go for it, but be careful we have a lot of junk back there," then told the officer that I'd peeked out the window to check on our backyard cat and she wasn't in her usual spot so I figured the person had been through there and disturbed her.

I suddenly remembered the hatch to under our house was open (because SOMEONE broke the latch and has been meaning to fix it for over a year) and I wanted to make sure they knew that was a possibility. I stuck my head out the back door and noticed the weeds growing by the hatch were standing upright, undisturbed. Nobody under there. An officer dressed in full SWAT gear told me, "Ma'am, go inside." I told him why I'd poked my head out and he repeated his request. Just then, Loki came tearing past him in a panic, grass seeds stuck in his fur. Two more officers in full SWAT gear came into sight. I called to Loki but he dashed through the gate to the front yard at full speed. Then I did what the officer told me to do, closed the door and went inside to open the front door and call Loki.

I called "LOKI KITTY! LO-KA-LO-KA-LO!" out the front door. One of the six officers in the street looked at me. I asked it he'd seen a black cat dash out of the backyard. He said, "No." then "There he is," just as Loki screamed "YOOOOW" from the side of the porch. Poor baby ran out to the front yard and saw more scary men so he ran past the front of the house to hide in the neighbor's hedge. When I called gently to him to come in, he dashed inside. It took us a good five minutes to calm him down, get the seeds out of his coat and for him to settle in for a good snuggle in Mama's arms.

The helicopter went on for around an hour then stopped. No news of any kind anywhere.

Great. Just as Eric leaves for a class in Berkeley for the rest of the week, something like this happens. Makes me wish I still had my baseball bat.

The whole story as much as I know it..

I went next door while Eric finished a load of laundry for his stay in Berkeley. Here's the whole story.

Lil, the mom next door was changing in the bedroom when a young black man walked past her window. He saw that she noticed him and said, "Please excuse me for passing through." Then he climbed the fence into our yard.

Matthew, the dad, called the cops and started going door to door warning people.

When he told the cops the young man was only walking, they said, "He's been running a while." We guess from that statement he'd been nearly caught in a bad situation and tried to get away, probably crossing over the freeway on the pedestrian overpass that comes into our pocket neighborhood from a rougher one, not realizing he was penned in on three sides.

Then he happened to be seen by someone proactive. The Neighborhood Watch signs all over our area should have warned him he'd made a bad choice in escape routes.

They did a yard-to-yard search starting with our yard and apparently caught the young man hiding one block over. I figured he'd gone that way. There really isn't anywhere good to hide in our yard that isn't filled with holly trees and palm trees, both of which scratch a person up very well. He couldn't have gone straight across to our other neighbor because his garage blocks the whole back edge of the yard and the back corner is a giant holly tree with a baby fan palm tree in front of it. His only private escape from our yard was into the yard behind us. It's a shorter fence, too.

So the scary man was a polite young man even though he was on the run. If you have to have bad guys, you couldn't get better than that!