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Four guys broke into an Old East Dallas home in the middle of the night as a woman slept upstairs. Surveillance video at the home shows at least one burglar was carrying a handgun.
The homeowner believes her barking dogs may have scared the burglars away but only after they spent a good five minutes inside the home with the homeowner’s girlfriend alone upstairs.
Looking at the video taken from the home surveillance system, Daniel Marks can't help but think of the what-ifs.
“What if they used the gun?” he wondered. “What if they came up to the third floor?”
Marks was out of town while his girlfriend was home alone and asleep in their home when four men came up the driveway at around 3:30 Sunday morning.
“They look up and notice there's a camera,” Marks said. “Their facial expressions drastically change.”
The burglars likely knew they were being recorded. Undeterred, they went into the house and stole electronics from a first-floor bedroom. At least one thief went upstairs to the second floor and took a laptop. But they never went up to the third level, where Marks' girlfriend was sleeping.
The next morning, she found the front door and a downstairs window wide open. On the bed under that window was a footprint, a sign that at least one thief crawled in that way and unlocked the front door.
“I'm a CHL holder,” Marks said. “I wish I were here when it happened originally.”
Marks isn't sure if the thieves were watching the house and saw him leave with his luggage or if one of them was able to unlock a window long before the actual break-in. Either way, he and his girlfriend are taking even more precautions to secure the house after one frightening near-miss.
“I think we're just lucky she slept through it and didn't come downstairs and didn't enter into the situation versus it maybe being a different result,” Mark said.
Marks believes the thieves didn't know his girlfriend was home. He's sharing the video in hopes that someone recognizes the robbers.