The Life and Times of Alann

We went to California to visit my parents along with the rest of my siblings and their families Aug 20-24 2010 and because we have pets and are trying to rent/sell the house we needed to have a house sitter. We choose a young woman from the stake, we'll call her "Janet", who we had used before to babysit and house sit before. Right before Janet was to watch the house she did a surprise early wedding to her now husband "Ben". We had never met Ben before but with Janet being such an upstanding young women and her now being married we allowed her to bring Ben over to the house. We also were thinking of renting the house to the couple at a discount because they are LDS and said they would take great care of it. Things with the vacation went great and we were happy to get home when the time came.

When we walked in the door the house was spotless and had a nice pleasant smell to it. We also discovered that some stains in the carpet had been removed and that lots of little nice extra things had been done to the house. The first odd thing i noticed was that the evaporator cooler was running but that the belt had slipped off the pulley and that the blades were not turning even it the motor was, so I turned it off. Then Becca notice a "ball bearing" on the floor, which was later determined to be a BB. On the way to the back I saw a paint can lid with a bunch of what appeared to be drilled holes sitting in the recycling bin in the kitchen. Why did they do that?

After that I went into the laundry room and found the light bulb missing from the ceiling fixture in the garage and had to walk through the garage in the dark to let the dogs out. On the way I found a pair of locking pliers holding a long shafted flat head screw driver just laying on my tool bench while a ratchet set was knocked over the back of the bench and wedge behind the wall. Odd, what were they doing?

I opened the door to the backyard and looked to my left and noticed that some small 2'x 4'closet doors we were working on had been moved outside and that some pots that had been stacked were also moved. After some quick investigation I found that someone had set up a BB gun range in our backyard and had shot our watering can, closet doors, and that paint lid. Not only that but they had missed sometimes and put 3 holes in the siding on the house. They had also taken the only light bulb in the garage out to use in some of my spot lights so they could light up the target area and then never put it or the spot lights back in their places.

We have now realized that the "ball bearing" in the house was a BB and that the pliers and screw driver tool were used to pry a BB out in our office were they shot the wall! These are the guys that are supposed to take better care of our place than another person off the street and for a discounted rent?!?! What else have they done to the house that we haven't found yet?

So far this only covers the damage they have done to the house (that we know of) I haven't even started to talk about the other odd things around the house that finally lead us to know that some major theft had happened. But for now, like after I discovered the firing range in our back yard, it is late and I will tell more of the story later after I get some stuff done and get some sleep. Oh i should mention that this story will probably be in 4 parts/days, Damage, Theft, Confronting, and Results