Security is tight at Fern Forest Treehouse


            
Two folks from Ohio joined us at Fern Forest last weekend. When Meghan was hired to work in the student abroad office at a university, Ryan relocated with her and looked for employment. He had majored in criminology in college, thinking he’d do something in law enforcement. Boy, does he ever.


            Ryan started his own commercial security company and has been hired by several department stores. One of them, a discount enterprise whose name I promised not to mention, kept him pretty active. Several times he watched a thief come in, pick up a forty-inch flat-screen TV in its box, and carry it out the front door without a glance toward the check-out lines. In broad daylight, mind you. Others filled one (or sometimes two) shopping carts with merchandise and wheeled out the goods, again without pulling out so much as a library card for payment.
            Ryan is muscular and fit, and those robbers were easy to chase down and wrestle to the ground. Some, however, were more of a challenge.
            He watched one man browse through bras in the women’s lingerie department. The man took three bras with him into the men’s room. Store policy required that customers have privacy in dressing rooms and restrooms, so Ryan sat outside the door and waited. Finally the man exited without the bras—or so it seemed. Ryan could see multiple straps under the fellow’s tee shirt, but it was against store policy to search a man’s undergarments, even if they were women’s undergarments. When Ryan checked the bathroom, he found no trace of the bras. Either the man had left the tags on the bras or he had removed and flushed them.
            At another department store, a large man came in with a petite woman and an empty shopping bag with the name of the department store on it. At that time Ryan was in his office watching the security camera monitors. He saw the man stuffing women’s clothing into the bag—some XS and some XL. Apparently they both enjoyed dressing up. When they left the store, Ryan managed to catch the woman and hand her to mall police, but the man took flight with the bag, Ryan in hot pursuit. When he passed a restaurant, a couple were having lunch on the patio. The diner saw Ryan chasing the robber and left his meal to help. They jumped fences and dashed across parking lots, clothes flying haphazardly out of the bag. Eventually the diner caught the robber and dragged him back to Ryan. The thief had cut himself on a chainlink fence and dribbled blood on some of the garments. The others were returned to the store, and the robber went off in a police cruiser.
            Probably Ryan’s most harrowing experience was following a young woman who walked out without paying for her items. He generally avoided wrestling with women, but when this one kept walking, he grabbed her arm. He had already alerted the police, who were on their way to the store.
            “Take your hand off me or you’re going to get it,” the woman told Ryan.
            He let her go but followed closely behind her. When the police caught up with them, they apprehended the woman and found a 35mm handgun in her purse—loaded. 
            Just as Ryan was wiping the sweat from his brow at that close call, the police emptied the gun of its bullets and handed it back to the woman. Then they told her she could come back the next day and collect the ammunition. State law restricts anyone under twenty-one from buying a gun, but it’s completely legal to be in possession of one—even to conceal it.
           "Do you carry?" I asked Ryan. He laughed.
           "Yeah, I carry a cell phone and a store identification card."
            Be afraid, robbers. Be very afraid.
            There’s no question that Ryan’s job is dangerous, and so we treated Meghan and him extra nice for their night in the Treehouse. The only robbers who came near us were a sorority of does eyeing my late summer gardens. Even without security cameras, I felt Fern Forest was in safe hands that night.

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