Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

I'm mad.
Last night, someone broke into my car and tried to steal my stereo, right in front of my house. They didn't know how to pull it out, so they only succeeded in breaking the non-removable faceplate. They got into the car by prying my driver's window outward enough to reach in (maybe with a wire) and unlock the door. When they failed at removing the stereo, they just left the car door open about an inch, so all the water from last night's rain soaked the driver's seat too.

So hooray. Now I have:
1) A screwed up window which I'll have to take the door apart to fix.
2) A broken stereo.
3) A growing concern about my neighborhood.
4) Still a huge deadline Monday which I'm behind now, since I had to wait on the police this morning.

Here's what I think happend. I had to go into the office last night to work from 6pm-1:40am. My car was parked in one of our two marked spots with an NCSU student parking tag on the windshield. Thursday and Friday this week are NCSU Fall Break. I think the criminal saw an empty parking spot beside my car and thought we were away on Fall Break, so there would be a better chance to break into my car.

So now I'm pissed off, and I'm thinking of what I could do to either secure my car better or try to catch a criminal if it happened again.
Here's some first-draft ideas:
1) Hook up a surveilance camera from inside the house watching the cars and recording movement.
- That might not be able to ID the person well enough, and wouldn't prevent the crime.
2) Get a car alarm
- My car's pretty old, it might not be worth the expense.
3) Make it look like I have a car alarm. I could build a tiny circuit to make an LED blink on the dashboard, or something similar.
- Might not trick anyone
4) Set a trap in the car with pepper spray/electric shock, etc and an alarm to go off if someone tries to pull out a stereo again.
- Could be dangerous for us driving the car if it went off by accident. Also it might be illegal.

I don't think i'll go for #4, but wouldn't it be great to catch a criminal like that? The trouble with lots of those are we'd have to be home to catch the guy. We like to take trips, so that's not always so likely.

I'll let you know if the police catch anyone. Apparently another car close by was broken into similarly last night.