Unknown (4:32)
This was early college years for me. My second job was a coffee shop. This coffee shop was open pretty late compared to most. Most coffee shops they close around like eight or nine at the latest. Ours was a coffee shop that was located right off of a freeway. So we were kind of known as a commuter coffee shop. We were open until 10 most nights, sometimes 11. The way our shop was set up, it was mostly just floor to ceiling glass windows, including the door. And it kind of stretched out in like a circle or a sphere because we were on a corner of the street. I'd been there about a year. There was one night I was working with two of my other coworkers. One of them was a key holder is what they call them. Just the person who had the key that would lock and unlock the door before and after the shop closed. 9, 50, we were kind of wrapping things up, you know, telling people, thanks for coming in, but we're going to close in about 10 minutes. And the way it worked is that when we closed at 10 o'clock, we were actually there till about 11 because we would close, lock the door and then start cleaning. So we get set up for the next day, started cleaning, did all of our normal processes and everything like that. A little bit before 11, we got done a little bit earlier than usual. When we got up to the door to leave, my key holder puts the key in and I had this weird feeling there was a little bit of like a blockage where you couldn't quite see what was happening. Slightly to your right or to your left of the door, there was like these pillars that was probably the only thing obstructing view from anybody. I grabbed her arm and I was like, hey, hold on a second. We kind of looked out and I looked out the front door and I noticed there was a person standing directly to the right hand side of the door. It looked like their back was to us. They weren't standing staring at us, they were just kind of looking out into our little parking lot. That was attached to our coffee shop. And this person was very tall, very large, very broad shoulders. Really took up an entire door frame. I was 61 at the time. This person was much bigger than I was. Is this my coworker's boyfriend? Is this my key holder's husband? They would come sometimes and pick them up from work or visit them. So I've met them before and I'm like, no, those people are way shorter than I am. Wouldn't be here this late at night. I don't think any of these people that are related to my coworkers, like, are taller than me or anything. I thought about regulars that came into our coffee shop. None of them really fit that description. I just kind of realized, I don't think we know this person. Hold on a second. I grabbed my key holder's arm and I said, hey, do you know that person? She kind of stopped for a second. She looked, and then I could see that she realized, oh, I didn't even know there was a person standing there. They had on a black trench coat, a black shirt with black pants, fully decked out to not be able to be seen. And then she said, I have no idea who that is. My other coworker, same thing. Don't know who that is. My key holder pulls the key back out, and similar to when she put it in, it makes a very loud sound. This person, once the key comes out, turns, walked right up to the door. They grab both handles of the door and just start really pulling on them, really trying to get inside. Something is not right. This is not a good situation. The person isn't just looking for help. They were trying to get in. Not just to use the bathroom, not to ask us a question, not ask us directions, but to get inside. My key holder grabs both of us and says, let's go in the back. I'm going to call the police. We go in the very back. This is not a big store. Wherever you are in the store, you can really hear what's happening. My key holder started calling the police. We could hear that the person was really aggressively trying to get inside. He's grabbing the door handles and he's really just rocking back and forth with them. We gotta do something. We gotta be ready in case this person gets in. If he really worked at it, it was gonna open because it was held together by a nothing lock. At this point, I was behind the bar. I was trying to think of anything we could do to be ready in case he got in. Cause the doors were really starting to Give. So I'm pulling out knives. I'm telling my other coworker, grab this, grab that. Get the bagel knife out. I even started, like, steaming water, just in case, like, we needed to throw that on the person. The whole while, he's pulling at the door, throwing his whole weight into it as much as he can, and then that just suddenly stops. I kind of peeked my head around the corner to see what was going on. And that's when I noticed that he has now stepped from the front door to the first set of windows that encircle our shop. He gets to that first window, and still staring in at us, he raises up his arm, and he goes, bang, bang. And then he drops his arm, and then he sidesteps to the next window, keeping his gaze on us, picks up his arm. Bang, bang. He does this in a very controlled, repetitive pattern. He goes from that first window to all of our windows across the entire store. It was this very calculated, calm bang on each window that felt like someone who was in control. My heart was racing. I don't really want to be here. I want to go home. This is a standoff between our group and him. He's playing with us. We were like fish inside of a tank, just sort of tapping on it to mess with us. My coworker, at this point had stopped pulling out knives, and she's just watching him, not sure what to do. We were just staring. We just kind of stopped. We were just kind of mesmerized. We were just watching what this person was doing, in shock. This person went from aggressive, erratic, just trying so hard to get inside, to just this very calculated, very controlled movement that felt like they were going to get in. And this is it for you guys. I'm checking in with my key holder. At this point, she had hung up with the police. They were on their way, but they had not said when that would be. They just said, stay in the back. Eventually, this person goes back to the front door, and they're really pulling at it. And I could hear snapping. The lock was ready to snap completely off. Eventually, the person just stops and then just booked it down one of our streets. We weren't really sure why. And then about 10, 15 seconds later, one of the police cars came pulling up to our parking lot. Car pulls up. So we go out. The officer just asks, is everything okay? And we said, you know, not really. The person was trying to break in. We have no idea what was going on. They went running down that street. The officer said, you know, okay, we'll Go home. Go directly home. Don't go anywhere else. Just be safe. Three or four other cop cars come peeling around the corner. Go straight down the street where this person went running. So we feel like, okay, someone's got tipped off. They know where this person's going to go. They're headed that direction. Best of luck. I went home. Thought about it, of course, a lot. I didn't work again for a few more days. I hadn't talked to anybody, so I didn't really think much of it. I went in for my shift, talked to my manager. He explained, I heard what happened. You know, how are you doing? You know, very nice. Obviously he had heard about the whole situation from my key holder, from talking to the police. We're just sort of connecting over the whole thing. He asked how I was doing. I was very curious, and he's just kind of asking, like, did you hear anything? Like, do you know anything that was going on? And it felt like he was not wanting to share too much of what he had heard. I just kind of pushed him and I said, you know, listen, I would rather know than not know if there's something you do know. And so he eventually told me that they did apprehend the person. It was not anybody we knew, was not a person that had come to our shop before that we know of. When they did catch this person, he had tons of stuff on him. Several different sized knives, large ones up to, like, the size of a butcher knife. He had a duffel bag that had rope and a syringe with tranquilizer inside of it, something that would knock a person out and was potentially planning to use those on us. I kind of went home after the initial incident thinking this person was just trying to break in or was just kind of messing with us, like, was just trying to break in, maybe to steal money because we were open late, but after hearing that they had all of this stuff ready to go, it started to feel like, oh, this was going to be something a lot more nefarious than I originally thought. I think that person would have easily overpowered us just because of how big this person was. Probably thrown us back inside the shop and used whatever they had in that bag and in their jacket, all those knives, the tranquilizer, the rope. And I don't think that we would have survived or if we did, it would have drastically changed our lives. It definitely is the scariest thing that's ever happened to me, for sure.
