On my way home from work last night, I noticed a sheriff’s marked unit parked in a cul de sac up the street. Not at anyone’s house, just parked, facing out, as if they were watching something. Since participating in the Citizen’s Police Academy last fall, I’ve been increasingly aware of our local police departments! I mentioned the car to my wife when I got to the house, but thought nothing more of it. Figured maybe the deputy was just taking advantage of a quiet, safe spot to do some paperwork.
A couple of hours later, my wife and I decided to take a walk around the block, something we do fairly frequently. We’d barely made it out of the driveway when we heard cars approaching from behind, moving quite fast. Powerful engines, by the sound. The vehicles swooped past us, fairly close, and then pulled to the side of the road between the neighbors’ house two doors down and our place. A couple of them were marked patrol cars, but the others were nondescript vehicles. A total of seven or eight converged. They didn’t park haphazardly, but instead lined the side of the road.
Another vehicle appeared from the side street (also a dead end) across the from us, as if he’d been waiting for a signal. Most of the people who emerged from the vehicles were dressed in suits or plainclothes. One fellow had a document in his hands, like maybe a warrant. None of them had weapons drawn, nor were they wearing protective gear. A couple of them had HSI on their jackets—Homeland Security.
A dozen law enforcement officers, if not more, approached and entered the house two doors down from us. Given the shootings during a police raid in Houston earlier this week, we decided it would be prudent to skip the walk. They stayed for at least an hour.
We hung out in the driveway like nosy neighbors for a few minutes. One funny thing happened: an officer returned to a vehicle parked pretty much in front of our house, the second-to-last in the queue. He pushed buttons on his key fob, but couldn’t get the trunk open. I heard the trunk pop open on the car beside me, the last in line. “Guess it helps if I’m at the right one,” he said, before retrieving something from the trunk. “It’s not my car.”
We know the family that lives there to say hello and exchange a few pleasantries, but not much more than that. Hard to imagine what Homeland Security would want with them. We came up with all sorts of theories about what might have been going on, but the fact that they didn’t go in with guns a-blazing squelched most of our suppositions. The fact that there were so many officers, though, was intriguing. I suspect the cop I saw on the way home was keeping tabs on someone at the house, maybe waiting for one of the residents to return home. Maybe they were waiting for a warrant to arrive. Who knows? Maybe we’ll never find out what happened.
A little excitement in the neighborhood. Funny thing is, because they all arrived with no lights or sirens, if we hadn’t decided to go out for a walk we mightn’t have noticed anything was amiss.
