Over the past month, there have been a handful of home invasion crimes reported. In some cases, victims have sometimes been tied up and even shot.
There is no question that these crimes are violent and dangerous, and could pose a threat to any of us who happened to get in the way of the crooks; but police said these are usually crimes where the bad guys and the victim know each other.
Back in mid-September, two men burst into a home on Olympia and ended up shooting a resident there in the stomach. Police at the time said they believed those involved knew each other and that they did not know what had been stolen.
A few days later, three masked men with guns broke into a home on Naples. Detectives again said it was unclear what was taken.
Then, just three days later on Hall Street, two men wearing bandanas over their faces broke down the door of a home there and showed the residents a gun. They began arguing over money and the men left and fired a shot.
On Monday, three armed men forced their way into a house on Dolores and told everyone to get down on the floor. It is unclear what was taken in that crime, but to veteran police officers, it is clear that these types of crimes usually only affect certain people.
"They typically know their attackers. There's a lot of cases where the attackers are strangers, but they're involved in the same network that circles back to the victim," said Senior Officer Kirk Stowers of the Corpus Christi Police Department. "And that's why you know one of the many reasons why really illegal narcotics are to stay away from."
Police cited a case of a home invasion in March of last year. It happened in King's Crossing and the homeowner, Javier Herrera, was shot three times in the back. His girlfriend and her two children were hiding in the bathroom and were not hurt.
Once police arrived, they ended up seizing one and a half pounds of marijuana and $59,000 in cash.
So the bottom line is that police say if you are not in the drug trade, then you most likely will never become the victim of a home invasion.