On Saturday, one of my neighbors had walked up to where we all were seated, looking like someone important in his life had died or something. When we asked him what was wrong, he had refused to say anything, and we had made a joke about how his face looked and all that, only for him to open his mouth and tell us that he was robbed the previous night.
What happened was that for the past couple of days now we've been having certain rooms in the building renovated, and his room happened to be one of those that were getting some work done. So after the guys left (they weren't able to finish working in his room that day), he decided to come upstairs to his girlfriend's room to have his bath because he couldn't bathe in his room due to how messed up the place was.
After he was done having his bath, he had sat down to spend a little time with her but ended up falling fast asleep. When he woke up that Saturday morning, he had gone back to his room to find the place even more scattered than it was when he left it. When he noticed it, he had gone straight to the one place where he had kept his money and found out it was all gone, the whole 1.7 million naira.
The guy who was robbed is a bus driver, and that money was the money he had made working from January this year till December, and it was gone, all in one night.
Apparently, the thieves or thief had gained access to his room from the balcony. He had locked his main door when he left to go take his bath but had only locked his balcony net and not the door. The balcony has two doors, a net, and the main door. People usually put a net door at their balcony to help keep out mosquitoes while fresh air comes in; it helps a lot during days when there's a lot of heat.
So these guys had accessed his balcony, cut open the net, and then ransacked the entire house. The crazy thing was that there was no way for the thieves to have known that he wouldn't be in his room that night, so our theory was that they probably had come prepared in a way where they were in a position to neutralize any resistance that they might have met when entering the room.
And if that was the case, then they probably would have hurt him badly, depending on what weapon they had on them.
After consoling him for his loss, I tried explaining to him that maybe him unexpectedly falling asleep may just have saved his life because no one knows the intentions those guys had when breaking into his house. But this was someone who just lost over 1.7 million naira; there was no way any of what I was saying was making sense to him.
And I understand him. Just that I feel rather than focusing on the money lost, if he focuses on the fact that he may have lost his life on the night of the robbery if he had been in his room, he just might feel a bit better about the whole thing.
