We got home yesterday and spent the bulk of the day getting our doctor’s checkups in. Dave visited Zetron and had lunch with the COO. In the afternoon we headed to the hanger to pick up a second car. We were shocked to discover it had been broken into. We had thought that a facility with barb wire fence, security guards, the only access with ID badged card keys, and huge padlocked doors would be a safe place for our stuff. Alas apparently not. In April we had an email from the guy in the hanger next door who had found the man door open and closed it for us. Presumably that is when the break in occurred. How we don’t know exactly, but the man doors (as opposed to the giant hanger rolling doors) are kind of funky so they may have been able to jimmy the door.
They took the car keys – why isn’t clear because they couldn’t get the cars out because they couldn’t open the big doors. They took Dave’s flight log book – which had no purpose other than to just be horribly mean. It has no value to anyone other than Dave and will now cause numerous headaches because proving his flight time (required by the FAA for additional certifications) will prove a giant pain. Yes, the FAA has a procedure for what to do in the case of a lost log book, but it isn’t pretty. They took a pair of speakers and a brad nail gun tool. They could have taken thousands of dollars worth of additional tools, but they didn’t. Probably because they only took what they could carry. The neighbor that closed the door may well have prevented further loss as they could easily have come back and took another armload.
The biggest lost was Melissa’s jewelry – worth about $6000. Sickening because there were some family heirlooms that cannot be replaced. Moreover, much to our shock, we discovered our insurance agent totally screwed up. When we lived in Woodinville Melissa had added a $5000 jewelry rider to our home owner’s policy, in addition to the standard $1000 in coverage included in the policy. But when we moved to the condo in Kirkland in 2008, the agent neglected to move the rider over to the new policy. So they will only cover the policy minimum of $1000. And we’ve been advised not to even file that claim because Safeco will change our risk profile which will affect our premiums on all of our rental properties – not just our own homeowner’s policy. So we are likely to pay way more than the $1000 we would get in premiums over the next few years. We are debating whether there is anything we can do about the fact that it’s very clear that the agent screwed up. Yes, Melissa didn’t catch their mistake when they omitted the rider from the new policy, but quality checking for omissions is problematic at best.
We ended up canceling most of our plans for yesterday and today in order to deal with the break in. Melissa even drove around to a number of pawn shops looking for the jewelry, but we learned that is pretty much useless because the police have access to the pawn shop records and because most thieves know this, 95% of stolen jewelry is just melted down for the gold and gemstones.
Bottom line is that it’s a sickening loss. Though it might have been even worse had all our belongings been there. When we left Seattle we had originally put all our stuff in the hanger, but a fire inspector told us the boxes had to be moved, and hence most of the rest of our belongings weren’t in the hanger because in January we moved the stuff to another storage location.