MEMPHIS, TN - Viviana Stewart was on the second floor of her house, doing some work on the computer, when Bluff City crime knocked on her door.
"I heard a knock on the door," says Stewart, "and by the time I went downstairs to see who it was, nobody was there."
So Stewart headed back up the stairs and got back to work. Next thing she knows, the wall rattled and she heard what sounded like a tree falling on the house.
"I felt the house shake," she says, "so I came downstairs to see what was going on. And to my surprise, someone was in the living room."
The shake that Viviana felt was a burglar kicking in her back door around 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, 2009. As Viviana started to make her way down the stairs again, she and the burglar caught eyes.
"He was at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at me," she says, "and he went uh-oh and ran back out the door."
Viviana ran for the phone and called Memphis Police. She was able to give investigators a pretty good description of the guy, even though she only saw him for a few seconds.
"He was like 5'9" to 5'10" tall," she says, "and was a dark-skinned black guy. He had a blue shirt, black shorts, tennis shoes and a tan baseball cap. He didn't have any facial hair or any distinguising facial marks."
He also didn't have a gun or the courage to stick around, lucky for Viviana.
As the MPD squad car sat outside her house in the 24-hundred block of Hollins in Binghampton, the neighborhood started buzzing.
A crime like this is unusual on a street where kids are safe to ride their bikes and where neighbors hang out for hours together.
"I'm speechless," says neighbor Jena Smith. "You know, there's a lot going on, so we just need to watch out for one another."
Smith's yard is surrounded by a fence that's kept padlocked at all times. A giant Rottweiler named Rock paroles the perimeter. The Smith family also keeps a peacock outside, a bird not known to be very friendly toward people. Security is a top priority for the Smiths and Viviana's run-in with the burglar is a reminder not to get complacent.
"I'm going to observe everybody," says Smith, "and if I see some suspicious activity, I'm going to alert who I need to alert."
Viviana learned a valuable lesson, too.
"Apparently, the storm door wasn't locked," she says, "because he just opened it up and kicked in the wooden door with the deadbolts on it."
From now on, she says, she'll be double-checking the storm doors, front and back. Because these days, she says, you can never be too careful.
"You have a lot of people who are out of work," Viviana says, "so you have a lot of people who will go through desperate measures to try and get a buck."
