The face of burglary: One woman’s story

How much could it have meant to burglars? Just another fistful of jewelry snatched from a home on Perkins Lane. Some of it was costume variety; some of it higher quality, they would have hoped anyway. To “Sylvia” and her husband, little bits of jewelry were memories of family. Thieves had no idea the baubles they stole were all that was left of relatives from the Old Country – all that remained of a family murdered in Nazi death camps. To the miscreants who ripped-off the place, it was another score. To the woman who came home to a ransacking, it brought back images of a mother and grandmother, now gone from this world.
“I was at work,” Sylvia recalled. “My husband called me and said, we’ve been robbed.”
Even though the sticker on the front window reads, ADT, which represented an expensive burglar alarm hooked up to monitoring, thieves somehow got past it and tore the home apart. As usual with burglary, it happened in the middle of the day.
“They just trashed everything – all of the jewelry drawers, my jewelry boxes, even my sock drawer,” Sylvia reveals. “Everything was just turned upside down.” Meanwhile, there was no sign how the creeps got in.
“I had a ring that was my grandmother’s,” she continues. “It was her family’s ring. That’s the only thing I have that they ever existed. My family was killed in the Holocaust. Having something to hold gives you a little bit of comfort when you think about them. You must hold onto something. It could have been a teacup. Just the fact that these people walked the earth once. Now when our children grow up, they won’t have that. They won’t remember those people.”
Police could find no fingerprints.
“Some of the things that hurt the most were not expensive things,” Sylvia says. “I remember my mother wearing something when I was a little girl. She used to let me play with it. So it became part of my childhood. It makes you feel pretty empty. I just feel empty.”
Residents who witnessed anything suspicious Friday on Perkins Lane are asked to contact Seattle Police.