An Inside Job

 

During the pandemic many strange things started happening in a certain building in downtown São Paulo. Three apartments had been broken into perhaps on different week with an interval of fifteen days. These apartments were where the people were either away at work because they were doctors or nurses and others were away at their beach houses or country houses. When they came back to their homes, they had noticed that the kitchen door had been broken open and inside it looked as if a tsunami had hit. Each incident was posted in the building´s WhatsApp group. All the information about the occurrences only caused panic among those who were away and even among those who were not leaving their homes.

Some of the people in the building we're putting up barricades against their kitchen door while they were in their homes resting, working or sleeping. Others were having locks put on their doors as well as peepholes so they could check out what was happening in the hall. Mind you, in this building there are a lot of elderly people who live alone and most of them live on their government pension. One particular 82-year-old woman living on the 10th floor all by her lonesome after her husband had passed away a year ago was the victim this past week.

On Friday night she noticed that someone was putting a key in the lock of her kitchen door trying to force the entry into her apartment. She panicked and called her relatives that live in the same building but on the third floor. They ran up the stairs quickly to see if they could catch who was doing it.

The same incident repeated on Sunday, however or luckily, as she was calling her daughter, she did not hear the pounding on the door. This time they were trying to kick in the door. At this point the daughter had lost it and ended up shouting about it in the building´s WhatsApp group. She had to take her mother to her apartment to sleep over because the mother was in great fear.

In her post, the daughter accused the owners of the apartments to be renting out to groups of men and, in her opinion, the apartments in this building should only be rented to families. As a result, this started a fight in the group. Some of the people accused her of discrimination and segregation while others agreed with her. Some even mentioned that the maintenance fees in the condo should be raised that way the type of the people who would rent the apartments would be higher; again, another comment of discrimination. The fight went on and on and yes it got to a pretty low level; however, no solution to the problem came up.

The 82-year-old woman´s apartment was attacked on Friday, on Sunday and the incident repeated on Monday. Not only was her unit vandalized, but also her daughter´s on the third floor. It was the last straw. The daughter screamed out war. She really lost her temper and call the people who were doing that to combat. If it didn´t come to a stop, she was going to call the police.

After this last post, the Superintendent decided to schedule a meeting for the coming Friday to talk about installing cameras in the fire escape stairway and also in the service halls because that's where the four kitchen doors( there are four units per floor) meet and where the aggressors have been breaking into the apartments.

The mystery is that no one comes into the building and they do not use the elevators. If they did it would be caught on camera for these places have them. It is an inside job. The burglars are living in the building.

Written: September 23, 2020

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