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Car trolling my street last night


PrincessMommy
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Last night I was helping my college daughter unpack her car after she'd arrived home from college.  I noticed this car driving up the street (we live on a dead end).  I only noticed it because it looks just like the car my contractor's wife drives (she's the designer) and it's not very common.   Of course, today I've seen this car EVERYWHERE. LOL.

We continue to unload the car and I see this car again, go up and then back down my street.  So I begin to pay attention. Sometimes it stops at the intersection of my street (I live near the corner) ... then leaves and comes back and goes up toward the dead-end.  Definitely odd behavior.

I need to water my new plants in the front so I do that.  I watch this car stop at the intersection of my street and sit there.  Then it backs up and turns onto my street again and goes up.... then back down a few minutes later.   This happens more than once.

I see it go up one more time... and some of my new plants are by the mailbox, and I'm in mama-bear mode and annoyed enough that I go water my plants and STAY to wait for this car to come back.  I want this person to know that I see them.  I go there (it's getting pretty dark by this time).  I ask my college daughter to come outside, just in case.  Anyway, the car comes back down from the dead-end.. and stops about 1 house away when it sees me.  It just sits there in front of my neighbor across the street's house, with its lights on.    

I tell daughter that I want to take the dog on a "walk" up the street, but she's on the verge of freaking out.  So I just stay there at the road in front of my house  - picking up sticks, etc.  Chatting with my daughter. The car does not move.  It stays where it is.   It is too dark to see who is in the car.    After about 10-15 min we decide to go back up to the house.  Once we're walking closer to the house, the car drives away.   I sit outside on the front porch prepared to take a photo but it never comes back.  Hopefully, they got the message. 

The car was too nice for a druggy car (IMO).  Plus, I don't think someone going to get drugs would troll the street...they'd go and leave.   

A friend thinks it was someone's Ex who was spying/stalking them (they're really bad at the spying part).   

 

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Sometimes cars like this get my attention and then I can see it is a teen with an adult and it looks like a driving lesson. We took my ds driving around the neighborhood when he was learning and I’m sure it looked suspicious.

But the sitting there for 10-15 minutes is really weird and we didn’t do that when we were teaching kids to drive.

In our neighborhood someone would have called the police. I frequently find my neighbors paranoid but that behavior would have definitely generated a police call in my neighborhood and our police would have come out pretty quickly.

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9 minutes ago, PrincessMommy said:

The car was too nice for a druggy car (IMO).  Plus, I don't think someone going to get drugs would troll the street...they'd go and leave.    

 

 

Addicts come from all socioeconomic groups. You can't assume that because it wasn't an old beater. 

With that said, it sounds like they could have just been trying to find a house. We have to do something similar every year for Girl Scouts because they seem to keep the cookies at a different house so often. I even joked to our troop leader about how people probably think we're looking for drugs when really we're just trying to pick up our order of Thin Mints. 😂

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3 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:

Sometimes cars like this get my attention and then I can see it is a teen with an adult and it looks like a driving lesson. We took my ds driving around the neighborhood when he was learning and I’m sure it looked suspicious.

But the sitting there for 10-15 minutes is really weird and we didn’t do that when we were teaching kids to drive.

In our neighborhood someone would have called the police. I frequently find my neighbors paranoid but that behavior would have definitely generated a police call in my neighborhood and our police would have come out pretty quickly.

 

The person might have been lost and they were texting the person whose house they were looking for.

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5 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:

Sometimes cars like this get my attention and then I can see it is a teen with an adult and it looks like a driving lesson. We took my ds driving around the neighborhood when he was learning and I’m sure it looked suspicious.

But the sitting there for 10-15 minutes is really weird and we didn’t do that when we were teaching kids to drive.

In our neighborhood someone would have called the police. I frequently find my neighbors paranoid but that behavior would have definitely generated a police call in my neighborhood and our police would have come out pretty quickly.

We did this with my youngest last year.  Except we didn't go up and down the same street.  We wandered through the neighborhood, going up several dead-end streets and coming back - once.  

But I agree, the stopping in front of my neighbor's house once they saw me was suspicious.   If they were lost, they could have wound down their window and asked me for directions.  

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So it went up and back your dead-end street at least 4 times, sat there while you were out by the curb and didn’t move until it saw you were leaving to go inside? I would have called the non-emergency number for the police about a suspicious car. There may be a lot of benign reasons for doing that, but a lot of non-benign reasons, too! 

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Well, I was driving around and around the neighborhood near our church on Sunday because my excessively grumpy toddler really needed a nap and driving him around in the car is the easiest way to get him to sleep...I look at houses as I go past because it gives me something to do and I'm bored.

I do sometimes wonder when I do that if someone is going to call the police on me for suspicious behaviour 😄

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2 hours ago, Where's Toto? said:

How long is your dead end street?  I live on a dead end street with only about 12 houses on it so it wouldn't take 4 tries to find an address.  A longer dead-end street, maybe.

oh gosh, not sure exactly.  They're all 1 acre lots so it's long but not crammed with houses.  Maybe 20 houses total.  

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So that happened on my street when I was in high school and I was home alone sick one day.  It freaked me out so I called the police.  They investigated and came over and talked to my mom afterwards as she was pulling into the driveway to thank her for having me call them.  It was a known burglary ring, out on parole, forbidden to associate with each other, taking notes on when people come and go so they'd know when & where to break in.  All of them went back to prison for violating parole.

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1 hour ago, Katy said:

So that happened on my street when I was in high school and I was home alone sick one day.  It freaked me out so I called the police.  They investigated and came over and talked to my mom afterwards as she was pulling into the driveway to thank her for having me call them.  It was a known burglary ring, out on parole, forbidden to associate with each other, taking notes on when people come and go so they'd know when & where to break in.  All of them went back to prison for violating parole.

wow.  That is crazy.

 

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the very first thing that came to my mind is a private investigator

DH was on workcover for a work injury. We had private investigators doing things like that trying to see if they could spy him doing anything active. Some of them even came to the house and spoke to us. They eventually paid the neighbour to SPY on us. but DH was genuinely very ill and they couldn't "find" anything incriminating. the neighbour must have felt guilty and before the shifted away they came over to apologizes.

 

My sister once had a crying baby at night that she couldn't settle. She put it in the car and drove around and around the block for about an hour. the police pulled her over thinking she was casing a house. they were very apologetic once they understood she was just trying to get the baby to sleep. One of the police officers told her that he drives to get one of his littlies asleep too.

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If you are in the USA, I think that would be cause for calling the local Police Department or Sheriffs Department and reporting the suspicious activity. They might or might not come out to check the people out. Hopefully they could send someone to check.

Here in our large rural subdivision, our HOA has installed a network of video cameras and people  who come here are (I believe) aware of that. The cameras are visible in the streets.   I suspect that  reduces the possibility of someone committing a crime here.

I am glad that you and your DD are OK.

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Or any one of you posters, rather than wasting police time or wondering if you ought to have done so, could've just waved the car over and asked them if they were lost. Which they probably were, nothing nefarious at all. Even if they were doing something criminal, they're probably not planning to escalate it right here, right now into murder.

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I haven't read any of the other responses, but wanted to say that I have engaged in that exact sort of behavior more than once in the past few years when visiting childhood neighborhoods with my mother in MA and again with my husband in PA.  We drove up and down a few times and pulled over on the side of the road to determine if which house is the right one, rehash old memories, talk about changes to the neighborhood and particular childhood house, etc.

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13 minutes ago, Amy in NH said:

I haven't read any of the other responses, but wanted to say that I have engaged in that exact sort of behavior more than once in the past few years when visiting childhood neighborhoods with my mother in MA and again with my husband in PA.  We drove up and down a few times and pulled over on the side of the road to determine if which house is the right one, rehash old memories, talk about changes to the neighborhood and particular childhood house, etc.

Oh, my husband and I did this last year -- we drove around the neighborhood over and over looking for his grandfather's house, and then stopped in front of it for awhile talking about memories, then went to his old house -- and drove away quickly when someone was looking out the window.  It wasn't a great part of town anymore so we didn't want to engage! But we must have looked suspicious.  

I don't think we would have sat outside any house for 15 minutes. That would be waiting for someone to get home, and finally giving up and leaving. I've done that before too. 

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1 hour ago, Amy in NH said:

I haven't read any of the other responses, but wanted to say that I have engaged in that exact sort of behavior more than once in the past few years when visiting childhood neighborhoods with my mother in MA and again with my husband in PA.  We drove up and down a few times and pulled over on the side of the road to determine if which house is the right one, rehash old memories, talk about changes to the neighborhood and particular childhood house, etc.

I just remember that I did this recently!  I was with some family members in a city they had once lived in, and we had to go by all the houses.  If I was in my hometown I would probably do the same.  When my family members did it, we stayed there too long for my comfort, and worse, they took photos which I think was creepy.  But I could see driving by, stopping for a bit, pointing out which rooms were behind the windows, etc.

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Delivery people often don't have identifying features on their car, and if they have a wrong address can do that kind of thing. Recently we accidentally put down our address (by we I mean DH) as the year, rather than our actual house number (which is close to the year, just two numbers off) and man did that confuse the delivery guy! He drove up and down our little street several times, then stopped at the end and called headquarters, who called me to clear it up. There is no house number on our street that fit what DH had written down, so he couldn't figure it out. 

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