Are Seemingly Unrelated Events Actually Connected?

[TheStatutoryApe]

Strange Confluence of Events...

Has anyone else had several things happen all at once or one right after the other that made you wonder how, if at all, they are related?

Tonight while at work I received a call about a female resident who needed to speak with me because she was worried her ex was going to show up to harass her. When I spoke with her she said that he had just called and told her he was on his way. I decided to hang out on the parking structure nearby the area she said he would likely come from.

While waiting I see that two kids are climbing onto the roof of a building next door. I called the cops and let them know. Shortly later they arrived and shined the light up at them which scared them away. They jumped back down the side of the building and when I went to look for them they were gone.

I start walking back toward the complex to go on patrol and suddenly the fire alarm klaxons in one of the buildings starts going off! I rushed into the building and started checking the alarm pull stations to see if one of them had been pulled and where.

After a bit the police and the fire department start showing up. Apparently the police officer who had responded regarding those kids had decided to drive through the neighbourhood and heard the fire alarms. He said he pulled into the top level of the parking structure got out of his cruiser and smelled smoke. Looking around he found some smoke coming out of the windows of an SUV.

The door was unlocked so he opened it and started dousing the fire with some bottled water he found in the car. It was some papers in the glovebox that were burning. The car ended up undamaged. The officer had the vehicle owner contacted who came out and said that nothing had been stolen from the car or damaged.

I come back to the parking area to find the cops and the firemen hanging out and they tell me this car had been burning. Its the area I was just hanging out in that I mentioned earlier. I hadn't seen anything and hadn't smelled any smoke at all. So I was standing there wondering "What the hell all just happened?"

I wondered if the guy I had been waiting for earlier had set off the alarm as a destraction. I wondered if maybe it was the kids I saw and they somehow snuck around onto the property where I couldn't see them. I wondered if maybe someone saw smoke from the car and pulled the alarm, but I was in the same area as the car when the alarm went off! Or maybe when I went to check on the alarm the kids I saw came back and set the papers in the glovebox of the car on fire.

Anyway, had this woman not called about her ex I probably would not have been in the area to see those kids and call the police. Had the fire alarm not gone off that officer may not have come to the parking structure. And had the officer not shown up its possible that no one would have gone up there and found the car burning and put it out before it got really bad.

We're also unsure if someone set that fire or if it may have been the wires in behind the glovebox. So perhaps it is also lucky that the owner had forgotten to lock his car doors.

 

[junglebeast]

It could be that those kids were just little rascals...after climbing onto the roof, they run through the school halls and pull a fire alarm for fun, then exit into the parking lot, find the car unlocked, riffle through the glove compartment and light it on fire.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but only in the sense of "why would anyone do that??" Well, don't forget that kids love doing troublesome things, and there's no reason why a glove box would spontaneously ignite.

 

[GeorginaS]

Good thing events happened the way they did.

One wonders sometimes at the coincidence of them all, huh?

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

It could be that those kids were just little rascals...after climbing onto the roof, they run through the school halls and pull a fire alarm for fun, then exit into the parking lot, find the car unlocked, riffle through the glove compartment and light it on fire.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but only in the sense of "why would anyone do that??" Well, don't forget that kids love doing troublesome things, and there's no reason why a glove box would spontaneously ignite.

That's pretty much what the police officer seemed to think though I have found that the police like to wrap things up neatly when there is really no way of doing so and its nothing of particular consequence anyway. Saves on report writing.
Ha! Reminds me of my old supervisor who was retired Compton PD. He said he once responded to a shooting at a bar, went inside, "Any y'all see anything? No? Good." Otherwise he would have had to write up witness statements for everyone who claimed to have seen something.

From what I could tell though the kids, the alarm, and the fire in the car were all completely separate events.

I had also wondered if maybe the police cars had scared away the ex boyfriend but he actually wound up showing up not too long after the police left and I had to call them back again. Busy busy night.