Anyway, I'm usually up very late, but I keep all my lights off since I'm usually scrolling on my phone or reading a book with a light. I know it's a bad habit, but don't judge. I heard a lot of noise coming from downstairs, so immediately I rushed down to see what was going on. I was especially worried since my parents are in their 60s, and if something were to happen, I would be their only line of defense. Looking back, I was sort of an idiot for this because I didn't have anything to defend myself if something really bad had happened.
Even then though, I came down anyway. The rustling was really loud and sounded like someone was scratching at metal or something. I turned on all the lights downstairs and cleared the kitchen and living room. After I made sure everything was mostly fine downstairs, I followed the noise into the garage.
I opened the door and turned on the light to see Karen with a crowbar looking like she'd been trying to pry open my car door. There were dents in the door frame where she had been trying to pry it open, and the paint was scratched up pretty badly around the lock area. I immediately started yelling at her and telling her to put the crowbar down, asking what the hell she was doing in my house.
She said that I should not even try and that she had already called the cops and that they were on their way to arrest me. Even in the moment, I found that extremely funny or at least ironic because I kept arguing with her, asking why she would be the one calling the police if she's the one that broke into my house.
Because Karen reported it as a robbery in progress, the cops arrived pretty quickly to handle the situation. This part made me nervous because they arrived quickly with multiple units and I wasn't sure what Karen had told them. However, I kept my hands visible and complied with everything they asked right away because I didn't want any misunderstandings here when they were responding to what they thought was a crime in progress.
The cops arrived and separated us immediately. Karen was outside yelling about how I had stolen her car while I tried to explain that she had broken into my house. Because of how hysterical she was acting and the whole crowbar situation, they asked me to come down to the station to sort everything out while they investigated. I was not formally arrested at that point, but they wanted statements from everyone involved. I complied pretty quickly because I knew I had not done anything wrong and wanted to get this mess cleared up.
When they interviewed me at the station, I explained that they'd been called to my house, not Karen's, and that I had woken up to Karen breaking into my garage with a crowbar and trying to break into my car. Reasonably, the cops were extremely skeptical of me. They probably thought that I was lying about that to try and get out of the whole situation.
The good thing was though that they were a little more inclined to believe me since I mean Karen had a reputation at this particular station for being the lady that calls for stupid reasons and non-emergencies. And luckily my parents were also being interviewed since they were in the house during the break-in. And they were vouching for me and insisted that I was not the trespasser, but rather Karen was. They confirmed that this was our house, that I lived there, and that Karen had no business being in our garage.
Because my parents were insisting that the house was mine and backing up my story, the cops finally started to believe me a little more and eventually questioned Karen about it. Apparently, after some back and forth, she finally admitted that she had been breaking into my house, but only to get her car back because I had apparently stolen it from her. She even showed pictures of her own identical Highlander, trying to claim that the car in my garage was actually hers.
According to what the police told me later, she claimed that her car had been stolen from her driveway and that I must have put it in my garage. She insisted they check her driveway to prove that her car was missing. When the officers went to verify her story, they found her Highlander sitting in her driveway exactly where she normally parks it. At that point, they realized her story made no sense, but they still had to verify ownership through the VIN and registration to completely rule out any possibility of a mix-up.
The police brought this information back to me, but I insisted that the car was mine and not Karen's. And so the police investigated further. They ran the VIN through their system and checked my registration and title paperwork that I had kept in the house. Within about 20 minutes, they confirmed the car was registered to me and had been purchased by me weeks before Karen even bought hers. The purchase dates via DMV records and all the documentation proved that I was telling the truth.