And just three days ago the paper said a group of kids from our local high-school were walking home and a car with Hispanic gang members inside drove by and fired one shot from a shot gun into the group. Police learned they were aiming at a kid who had earlier refused to join their gang!The median home price in my city in '02 was $125K. It peaked at a ridiculous $375K in '07 and has collapsed to $115K today. As a result thousands bailed from their houses and foreclosures now litter the landscape. All these empty homes have now created a new type of crime in which people break into the homes, replace the locks and advertise a home as being for rent on craigslist. Then they wait until a desperate family, usually hard working immigrants with limited English, come to see the home. They then talk the family into giving them cash up front to move in. Of course the family will move in only later to get a knock on the door from the bank wanting to know why they are living in the home.
Criminals also use these empty houses for many other types of crime including the one which happened to a local coin buyer recently. For many years now we have had three people who run regular adds in the paper to buy coins, gold, silver, etc. One owns the local coin shop and the other two are private collectors. A few weeks ago one of the private collectors, who I've dealt with over the years, received a call from a person wanting to sell some gold and silver bars. The caller represented himself as a disabled senior citizen and he and his wife wanted to sell their bars but didn't want to leave the house with them as they were afraid to do so in our city. Over the phone they agreed of a price of $65K and the buyer agreed to come to their home. The senior couple also would only deal in cash since the buyer was a private party and not a retail coin shop.
So the private buyer calls back to verify the phone#, picks up 65K at the bank and heads to their home. When he arrives the home has a nice appearance so he leaves the money in a brief case in his trunk and knocks on the door. When the door opens he is immediately grabbed, pulled into the home and thrown to the floor. Three masked men then tie him to a chair and pistol whip him asking for the money. He says he decided not to bring it yet and first wanted to physically see the bars. So they pistol whip him until his nose is shattered and eye socket broken. They grab his keys and find the money and drive off in his car leaving him tied to the chair. The robbers were speaking Spanish to each other I might add.
Turns out the robbers simply broke into a recently foreclosed home in a nice neighborhood. Used a disposable cell phone to call the buyer and waited for his arrival. I obtained all this information from the local coin shop owner who is friends with the victim and had visited him in the hospital. The victim might also lose one eye.
So much for the American dream in my (once) fair city.
