This is a true story written by Momo with a few minor edits. Let me preface it by saying we live in sort of a sketchy part of Philly.

So at around 10:30 last night, JJ and I were reading in bed. We heard some footsteps on our roof deck, but figured it was just our neighbor. Then we heard a helicopter outside. Now, we have heard helicopters outside before and have seen them shining lights in our neighborhood looking for people. But we started to see random lights starting to shine into our bedroom through the skylights. First, not so often; then over and over again. So we get out of bed and look out our window to see our neighbors on the street and a couple of cops.

I went downstairs to check it out and opened our door to ask Julie (neighbor) what was happening. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear anything because of the loud helicopter. But then I noticed that there were about 5 cops on our street, shining their flashlights towards the roof of our house and our neighbor’s houses. The helicopter finally left and one of the cops asked if we had heard footsteps on our roof, and we said yes. So they asked if they could come up to our roof deck and check things out, to which we said yes again. Two cops came up and checked things out, but found nothing. On their way down, I asked one of them what was happening, and he told me this:

Apparently a guy broke into a pharmacy a half a block away and when the cops arrived, the guy somehow escaped onto the roof and was trying to get away from the cops by running across the roofs of all the houses on our block.

Well, they didn’t see him anywhere from our roof deck, so they quickly gave up and told us to call if we saw a thin black male in a white dingy t-shirt. At this point, we were all on the street with our neighbors, kind of freaked out. The cops left, and a minute later our next door neighbor (whose house is at the end of the string of roofs) came out and says that he just saw the guy on his roof. So JJ ran down the street to alert the cops still positioned at 20th, and Julie called 911 to tell them to come back.

Also at this point, our neighbor Marcel decided that it would be funny and smart to grab his camera to document this event on Webster Street.

The cops came running back toward our house and some of our other neighbors who were on their own roof decks across the street yelled down to the police that they could see the guy running across the roofs. At this point, the helicopter showed up again and there were 2 bicycle cops, 2 cops cars, a cop van, and about 4 other cops on our street looking for this guy again. Four of them ran back up to our roof deck and spent the next 30 minutes up there trying to get this guy. But they never got him – 10 cops against 1 burglar.

When the cops were coming down the stairs the second time, a couple of them noticed our keg-o-rator and were asking JJ about it. When the cops finally left our street, one of them drove by and stopped where JJ and I were standing and said to JJ, “hey buddy, if you are ever looking for a roommate, give me a call”.

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