Stolen Goods (Revised)

The best way to make quick money is to rent a bouncing castle for your child's birthday, then when you're done celebrating, take the castle with you! This is exactly what happened to my brother, Qumar, a few months ago. Having been in the bouncy house rental business for over three years, this was a first for Qumar.

On this particular Saturday, the phones were busy and the trucks were out in full force delivering the bouncing castles all over Sacramento. Qumar has nearly 20 bouncy houses complete with generators. Chuck, the employee that works for my brother, went to set up a jump house in McKinley Park. He set up the jump house and informed the renters that he would be back at 6:00 p.m. to pick it up, the normal routine for renting jump houses.

At about 5:45 p.m., Qumar got a call from Chuck exclaiming that the party and the bouncing castle had disappeared. Qumar, my nephew, and I went along to see what had happened. Upon arrival, we spotted the park police hanging about in the playground seemingly doing nothing important.

Qumar asked them if they had seen anything mysterious happen – especially with the bounce house that was set up earlier that morning. The police officer said that he had questioned the renters of the bouncing castle earlier, because they had deflated the castle immediately after it was set up and were stuffing it in their car.

As the officer continued to question them, a woman came running to him screaming "my son has disappeared; I think someone has taken him!" As the officer went to help the woman near the playground, the thieves had disappeared with the bouncing castle, worth $5,000 or more, including the generator. Qumar filed a report.

We returned home dejected. We devised a plan to locate the residence of the woman who had called to book the jump house. She had signed a rental agreement and had paid cash up-front for the jump house, the norm for renting a bounce house from Qumar. He illegally obtained the address of the woman through a friend who works for a major mobile phone company by giving him the phone she had called from.

At 9:00 am the next morning, we were standing outside the woman's house. The stolen bouncing castle was sitting in the doorway of their house; the door ajar. Men were removing the other stolen goods from the car and taking them inside.

Qumar decided to call the police and tell them that there was a man waving a gun at him at such and such location in an effort to get them there quickly. The police was there in a matter of minutes!

The officer who responded to the call was a female officer who could have easily been mistaken for a man. She had a mean look about her – a no-nonsense type of demeanor, complete with a short haircut and butch-like facial features. Immediately, she asked where the gun-wielding aggressor had gone. My brother shrugged and said, "he ran that-a-way," pointing in the general direction of nothingness. He then explained that he had gotten a tip on where the people who had stolen the bouncing house lived. Pointing to the rolled up purple blob in the doorway and saying “that’s it.”

The officer got angry and said, "you know you're not supposed to be taking the risk to come out here, this is what we are here for." I was pretty sure that if we waited on the cops to do anything in the case of the missing bouncy castle, we’d be waiting for eternity.

Upon entering the residence and arresting one person - the cops discovered that there was much more than Qumar’s stolen merchandise in the house. They discovered four to five large Ziploc bags full of marijuana, rolls of cash, and stolen electronics. They also found other generators besides Qumar’s and other bounce houses.

Unfortunately, even though we had done most of the “dirty” work in recovering not only our own merchandise but other people’s as well – we were not acknowledged for doing it. Instead, we were asked to produce official documentation (receipts) for our merchandise before we could take any of it.

There was a valuable lesson to be learned from this experience. If you want to get your valuables back from bouncy-house-thieving-parents, you have to do it yourself - and don't expect any niceness from the boys (in this case girls) in blue!