When I returned from early morning breakfast at about 7:40 AM today (September 12, 2017) I found the lobby door to my apartment building ajar with some visible damage to the door. The door seemed undamaged, closed, fine when I left about a half hour before. There was a police car parked on across the street which is unusual.
The open damaged door looked a lot to me like someone had forced it open.
I later asked the apartment management if there had been a break-in and they indicated they had no knowledge of a break-in. There was no evidence of any entry to my apartment which is located directly above the lobby door.
This is a closeup of some scuff marks on the door:
This is a picture of the police car parked across the street:
This is a closeup of the license plate of the police car (1457472)
It is difficult to know what to make of this without more information. I am more uneasy over this incident than I would normally be due to the break-in at my personal storage locker in early July and my mysterious automobile accident on July 19. Hopefully, it is just a random coincidence.
UPDATE: September 14, 2017
Good news!
I was able to contact the Mountain View Police Department regarding the police car parked across the street. This was the relevant part of their response to my inquiry:
There was no threat to public safety when you saw our car yesterday on Del Medio. We responded to a call of a missing person. That case has since been resolved.
I would note that that is not an explicit denial that the lobby door was related to the police car, but, if so, the lobby door probably would not be the sort of incident I was concerned about.
According to the apartment complex management, they are not aware of any incident and the chrome plating on the door has a history of coming unglued. I still suspect something happened with the lobby door — I have used it for many years and never seen something like this — but these responses support that it probably has a mostly innocuous explanation. It still would be nice to know exactly what happened. 🙂
(C) 2017 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).