A young nurse was forced to watch a home invasion live on her phone while she worked the night shift and her family slept at home.
Jess had just installed her home security system to try to find out which of her children was stealing her chocolate from the refrigerator.
But an alert on his phone while he was on a break at 1.30am did not reveal the chocolate thief, but instead showed three young men breaking into his home in Hervey Bay, Queensland.
“So I called my husband and told him there are three people in the house, it looks like they’re trying to get in. Get up and check on the kids,” Jess said. A current issue.
By the time her husband Nathan realized what was happening, the thieves had already gained entry.
Jess (left) was forced to watch a horrific home invasion live on her phone while working the night shift and her husband Nathan (right) and their children were sleeping at home.
Security cameras captured the three men lurking around the family home in the dark and grabbing something from the kitchen bench.
nathan went down to confront the home invaders.
“(I) made as much noise as I could when I walked out the door to try to scare them away,” he said.
They ran off and then he chased them down the street for a while to see if he could catch one of them.
When he returned to the house he saw that the garage door was wide open and his wallet and keys were missing.
Nathan called the police as Jess ran home to her shocked family.
They still have our keys. “They don’t know we’ve changed the locks, they don’t know we’ve changed access to our cars,” he said.
“So there’s definitely still a fear that, at any moment, they could come back.”
The couple decided to speak out about their ordeal amid the current youth crime crisis in Queensland.
They want the raid to serve as a warning to others that they should not be complacent about the risk of home invasions.
Security cameras captured the thieves sneaking around the family home in the dark and grabbing something from the kitchen bench, which turned out to be the car keys.
“We thought we had done everything we needed to do to keep ourselves safe, to keep our kids safe and it still wasn’t enough,” Jess said.
‘They’re not just stealing possessions, they’re stealing parts of people’s lives… like they’ve stolen our security. You can’t get that back.’
Although the home security system was created to catch a chocolate thief, it ended up saving the family from a much worse fate.
