The Night My Doorbell Camera Captured a Shooting
The 36-second video changed my perspective on home surveillance
At first, I wondered briefly if the popping sounds we heard outside were fireworks. K, my boyfriend, looked over at me. It wasn’t late — maybe 9 or 10 o’clock on a Saturday night in February. Our one-year-old was asleep upstairs, and we were standing in the hallway, getting ready to retreat to different rooms. The latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy was waiting for me on Hulu; he had video games to play in his man cave.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
Before I could respond, we heard people screaming. For a moment, we didn’t move, and then K darted around me and up the stairs to our daughter’s bedroom, which faces the front of the house. I was close behind him. He snatched her out of the crib and handed her to me. I immediately went into my office, closed the door and sat on the floor away from the windows, soothing our now crying toddler.
Once she quieted down, I strained my ears to listen. The popping sounds had stopped, but I could still hear faint voices outside. The walls of our three-level home in the suburbs felt penetrable now in a way they hadn’t before.
My boyfriend returned a few moments later. “You can come out,” he said. “Whatever happened is over.”
“So it was a shooting?” I asked.
“Yeah. I found blood outside by the front door.”
In 2016, a few months after the birth of our daughter, K and I bought a house in a quiet, family-friendly neighborhood in Grovetown, Georgia, outside of the city of Augusta. My partner thought it was a good opportunity to make our home as “smart” as possible. He works far away, so he wanted a surveillance system that would enable him to check on the house easily. His vision was Alexa on every level, security cameras inside and outside, and the ability to adjust the thermostat from our phones — maybe even smart appliances one day, when we could afford them.
“How cool is this smart fridge though, Kim?” he asked me excitedly one day as we researched smart appliances. “It has a touchscreen!”
As for me, I was perfectly satisfied with a dumb refrigerator. Whatever conveniences…
