One recent afternoon, Oakland resident Jennifer Pahlka heard someone playing her piano.
"As I head toward the stairs, I hear a sound in the bedroom and go in," Pahlka writes in the San Francisco Standard. "There he is: a young, tall, very blond man, going through the plastic baggie I had thrown jewelry into when I came back from the East Coast last month. The dresser drawers are open. I'm seeing him in profile, but he turns to me, and his expression is one of frustration. Why am I interrupting him, he seems to say. What the hell am I doing here?"
That's when things got very strange. And they stayed unnerving even when the cops finally showed up… two days later. In her frightening and deeply thoughtful essay, Pahlka—founder of Code for America and author of Recoding America—tells a tragic and revealing tale of mental illness, a broken system of law enforcement, and how systemic failure "ends up ensuring the very outcome it meant to prevent."
Not your key, [the intruder] says. Not your house. My house. He nods. My house, he says again.
The pieces start to fall into place. When I walked into the bedroom and screamed, I was disturbing him. That's why he yelled at me with such irritation. That's why he leaves so slowly, plays the piano and keeps coming back. That's why he returned the car key but kept the house key. He was pumping his fists with the frustration of being kicked out of his own house.
Previously:
• Man who tried to break into house left severed finger behind, leading police to his arrest
• Unusual home invasion in Ohio (Update: fake? real!)
