As usual, I am done with my graduate work at a very late hour. I get on the bus home, and I am feeling very good about my accomplishments for the day. I always sit in the back right side and look out the window. It’s a very peaceful ride. Soon, at about 8:30, I reach the bus stop, get off the bus, place my headphones in, and start my nightly skip home to the rhythm of my music.

On the way, I skip by my friend’s house. Soon after, as I climb the stairs to my third-floor apartment, the police officer that lives below me is running; out of his own home and down the stairs. I notice lights of cop cars passing by.

However, I don’t give it much thought. It’s just another night. I enter my apartment, and lock the door behind me with my brand new padlock, as just two days earlier my friend and I heard somebody wiggling the knob, trying to get in. As soon as I enter, my phone rings. I look at who it is, and it seems to be my friend who’s apartment I just passed.

“Mona, did you see?”
What? Of course not! I was wearing headphones and can’t see. I wonder what’s going on.

The next day I read in the newspaper that an armed robbery happened right in the building I passed by the night before at around the exact same time!

Apparently, they were checking the doors of different apartments to see which houses were unlocked. They walked in on and robbed a Korean Bible study group and managed to make it away with $7,000 worth of merchandise. However, they only made it to the apartment complex across the street for about 2 hours before they were caught. The people who were committing the crime weren’t even organized enough to carry everything in bags.

Definitely not a Banana Day for me, but definitely one for the Bible Study group AND the armed robbers! But that day I learned what I could miss out on when I had headphones in my ears.

For more information (even though to happened three years ago), here’s a link to the article:
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20120301/ARTICLES/120309988