|
David Cordell
This is the house where the break-in occurred. It is bigger than it appears from this angle. The front door points toward the middle of the intersection of Michael and Tracy. The windshield of the vehicle in the porte-cochère is smashed in front of the driver position -- the size of the damage is about a foot in diameter. None of the windows of the car were broken, so theft didn't seem to be the goal. One doesn't try to break into a car through the windshield.
As Becky and I walked past that house this morning, the homewowner (Randy) was watering in the backyard. I could see him through the open gate. I walked toward him on his driveway and said something about how traumatic it must have been. He came out onto the driveway and spoke with me, and then four other people stopped by to listen.
He explained that he and his partner didn't hear the break-in initially. The bedroom door was closed and the fan was on. When they did hear something, they checked their smartphones to see the recording from the Ring camera they have inside the house. It didn't show any activity. When the exited the bedroom, they saw that the leaded glass in the door was broken in by someone heaving a concrete angel through it. Randy called the police who arrived very quickly. Randy's mother lives upstairs and uses one of the bedrooms as a TV room. She hadn't been disturbed and was still asleep when the police arrived. Her TV room, however, had been ransacked, and there handprints on the wall near the light switch that appeared to be bloody.
Randy said the Ring camera had never malfunctioned before. He viewed it as an act of God because if he had seen anything on the recording, he would have gone out with his gun to protect his mother and probably would have killed the intruder.
Randy's outdoor Ring camera did workand he showed me the video. It showed a black male, probably in his twenties, breaking out the glass and opening the door. (Kurt, I haven't seen the video that you mentioned.)
It turns out that people had seen the intruder earlier, lying on a bench along the hike-and-bike trail right behind Randy's house, which is about a hundred yards from the site where the dead woman was found. Others had seen him on another bench several hundred yards farther down the trail.
As Kurt said, the intruder was apprehended at the corner of Legacy and Custer, and he kept repeating, I ain't fuckin' afraid." He is presumed to be the murderer of a woman who was just out for a jog in a nice neighborhood.
One especially creepy aspect of the story. On the morning prior to the morning of the break-in and murder, I passed a couple of neighorhood girls who had attached hammocks to a couple of trees along the trail, maybe two hundred yards from where the dead woman was found. They had spent the night out there. I had never seen that before, and I doubt that I will again.
The dead woman, and that seems like such an and empty phrase, was a runner. She was married and a mother of two. She had a masters degree from UT Dallas and was a research manager at UT Southwestern. Apparently she was sexually assaulted in addition to being killed.
On our walk this morning, before I met with Randy, I saw a couple walking about a hundred yards ahead of Becky and me. They appeared to be carrying their shoes as if they were walking barefoot. Then I saw them place the shoes against a tree, and I realized that they hadn't been wearing those shoes. It turned out that the runners' club decided to create a memorial, and people were leaving their lightly used shoes to be distributed to needy people.
|
