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| The 2nd package left by the "kibbeh stalker" |
December 16,
2012
The Kibbeh Stalker by Laura Kina
A holiday story, of sorts, about neighbors, food profiling and home security.
We got a good deal on our house, a
brick vintage 1920s Chicago bungalow with a two-car garage and small, enclosed
backyard. It was shortly after 9/11 and located next to a Pakistani mosque. I
was drawn to the nearby ethnic South Asian grocery stores of West Roger’s Park Devon
Avenue where I could get a steady and affordable fresh supply of fruits,
vegetables, rices, and spices for my cooking habit - a creative alternative and
outlet to my career as an artist and college professor. My husband, Mitch, was
nostalgic for the old Jewish neighborhood this had once been, where his orthodox
grandparents used to live.
I stood near on open upstairs
bathroom window my first day in the house - the sonorous minor keyed call to
prayer from the mosque intertwined with Mexican mariachi music from a Sunday
afternoon backyard family barbecue and the low thumping base of a sub-woofer
pumping out rap music from my neighbor “Big Eric’s” car that he was working in
the street. When we walk our dogs around the block, the smells are similarly
polycultural – the sweetness of steamed basmati or jasmine rice, the savoriness
of simmering dal, curry, grilled kabobs, or warm corn tortillas and the fresh
scent of detergent drift from the exhaust fans and vents. Once, I went to get
the mail, and in-between the bills a squirrel had left a gift of chapatti
pilfered from a dumpster from an Indian restaurant on Devon Avenue. Exposed
telephone and cable wires link the houses in the neighborhood and if you look
up, it’s not uncommon to see sneakers thrown across the line as well as bagels
left by the squirrels that hang from the wires like odd Christmas ornaments.
We’d lived there
ten years when the first package arrived. It was Thursday, October 25, 2012
during the Muslim holy day of Eid-al-Ada. I’d gone out to the grocery store,
during my afternoon studio break from painting, to get supplies for the evening
dinner. When I returned, under our wooden patio table with the faded red
umbrella I’d forgotten to put away, I found a white plastic grocery bag stuffed
with warm minced ground lamb kibbeh. The bag said “100% Zabiha Hallal” and was
neatly closed with sailors bowline knot. I assumed it must have been a mistaken
gift for one of our neighbors. Maybe it was for Mr. Kahn two houses down? After
opening the package to look for a note, I tossed it in the trash, only mildly
wondering why someone had come into our backyard rather than leaving it by our
front door.
On Friday afternoon
of the 26th of October, just when I returned from a brief errand,
the same exact package arrived – again 20+ warm ground lamb meat kibbehs in the
same bag with the same signature knot. I thought to tell Mitch about it this
time as it seemed someone was waiting for me to leave the house before
delivering the package. I was still convinced it was a mistaken gift for
another neighbor.
Almost a month
passed until the next mystery package arrived. It was Friday, November 16th
at 6:16 am when I heard our little Shiba Inu dog Bongo wildly barking,
something he usually doesn’t do. We were busy getting ready to get our daughter
Midori out the door to the school bus on time. I walked into the kitchen and
felt a draft of cold air. An intruder had just broken into our house through a
back door Mitch accidentally left unlocked when he let our dogs into the backyard.
There was a gray bag of food on our kitchen counter. I could tell from the knot
that it was from the same person who left the packages from before. I nervously
opened the bag and this time found clear plastic bags filled not only with the
same kibbeh but also a bag of hot boiled chicken and something that looked like
empanadas. We called the police to report the kibbeh stalker. It happened to be the Hindu holiday of Diwali.
The 9-1-1
operator reluctantly sent out a patrol car to respond to our odd intrusion. The
officer shook his head when he heard our story. “So let me get this straight,
you left your back door unlocked?” he grilled us. He didn’t seem to care that
someone had broken into our house since technically it was not “breaking and
entering” and because we left the door unlocked and they didn’t take anything.
We got a lecture on how unsecure our house was. “Aren’t you going to take the
bag for fingerprinting?” we implored. “This ain’t CSI,” the cop sarcastically informed
us. “Chicago police can barely find time to process the finger prints when
there’s a body involved.”
We’d have to
solve this ourselves. “It has to be someone local,” I surmised. The food was
warm each time and I knew I had seen the bag before. After Mitch drove Midori
to school, we proceeded to drive up and down Devon Avenue comparing the graphic
design and wording on the mystery bag to the grocery store awnings. After three
passes, we found a match. We cornered the store manager, Zarina, who said her
name sounds like Sarina with a Z, who was just getting into the office. “Did
you see anyone in here earlier today who purchased these items?” We told her
about the bag of kibbeh. Her head was modestly covered in a silky hijab, her
hands decorated ornately with mendhi and she was wearing a Nike tracksuit,
high tops and a tough Chicago accent and attitude. She conceded that it was her
store’s bag but they don’t sell precooked items in their deli. “Let me reassure
you,” she teased, “I’m Muslim and I can tell you their ain’t no Muslim holiday
that involves breaking and entering and leaving meat products!” “The police
aren’t going to do shit,” she went on, “I have my ways of making shop lifters
pay.” She encouraged my husband to consider getting a handgun for protection.
“Was this a hate crime?” I wondered.
An outsider would know we were Jewish because of the mezuzahs on the doors and
the conspicuous sukkah that pops up in the fall. Why were they giving us
unkosher meat? “Breaking into my house does not feel like a gesture of neighborly
love,” I told my friends, “someone out there has a very sick sense of humor.”
“Perhaps it was an odd art school college prank,” they suggested. In my ten
years of teaching I have seen very little evidence that most of my students
know how to cook beyond instant ramen noodles.
But what about the food clues? They
didn’t match up to the South Asian and Jewish restaurant demographics of the hood. We know our neighbors pretty well and
this didn’t seem like their food either - Lori is gluten free, Bob and Anna are
vegans, the houses next to us are Mexican or African American, or new
immigrants from India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, China, or Vietnam. “This
must be an impostor,” I thought.” Besides mixing up holidays from two different
religions (Eid-al-Ada and Diwali); plain boiled chicken, not in a sauce nor
grilled, is something a non-cook might pass off as food unless you are making
chicken stock or sick or something. Most of the time when I order kibbeh it's
from a Middle Eastern Lebanese restaurant. And this area of West Roger’s Park
and Devon Avenue is not the neighborhood for this. And empanadas...that's more
Spanish, Filipino or Latin America isn’t it? “This must be a prank for sure,” I
surmised. But who out there hates us?
Mitch runs sober living residences
in Chicago and our #1 suspect became a mentally ill “person of interest” who
had been cyber bulling us the year before. He is a college-educated, white male in his 20s who I’ll call
“Stan” who actually listed “cyber hacking” on his LinkedIn profile. After
relapsing, Mitch had to ask him to leave one of the sober houses. These are the
rules, after all, of a sober living environment. Out of the blue six months
later Stan started demanding his money back in increasingly hostile text
message threats. Mitch agreed to meet with him in person to discuss the
situation but Stan insisted the money be sent at once through Paypal. The
dollar amount kept increasing and Stan started to set ultimatums that if it
wasn’t received by a certain hour he would do something “big” to our family. He
threatened to expose a fabricated affair, reminded us that he know where we
lived, and where I worked. He started e-mailing me too. All along we tried to
file a police report and obtain a restraining order but we were told that
unless one of us had a romantic affiliation with Stan or lived with him before,
we could not legally get a restraining order. The state laws on cyber bullying
were confusing, at best.
One night, Mitch had texted Stan
back to meet him in a public place at 7 pm and he informed him he was bringing
his attorney with him. Stan wrote back that was not acceptable and if the money
wasn’t sent by 7 pm that night, he was going to come to our house. Mitch left
to the appointed meeting place at 7 pm to wait. I was at home with Ariel,
Mitch’s teenage daughter, and our seven year-old daughter Midori. There was a
snowstorm rolling in. We were nervously poking at our food and the girls
started to talk about what they would do if a person broke into the house. To
my horror, they exchanged tips and demonstrations on how they would take the
intruder down. “Kick him in the balls!” my seven year-old exclaimed. Ariel
asked if I had the guts to use a kitchen knife to poke his eyes out. Disgusted,
I suggested that they seriously might be better off finding a good hiding place
and calling the police. Just then, at exactly 7 pm, someone loudly knocked at
our front door. Bam-bam-bam! I leaped up from the dinner table, started cursing
and threatened the person outside the door.
I heard a little boy’s voice
pleading that he had just come to offer to shovel our walk. He ran away and I
felt horrible for having exploded in front of the kids. “That’s it,” I
resolved, “no more being scared.” After two weeks of cyber bullying we got a
detective on the case who suggested we simply stop responding. If Stan had
really wanted the money, he would have met with Mitch. What he was getting off
on was the attention of making us scared. The detective paid Stan a visit to
ask him to stop and we successfully obtained an open warrant for his arrest
should he threaten us again.
But would Stan break into our house
and leave bag of food? I knew I had seen these particular kind of kibbeh before
from Kedzie Avenue in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago where many
Lebanese Christians had opened Middle Eastern restaurants. Stan used to live in
Albany Park. We knew he had gone back to the streets. We checked to see if he
was currently in jail. He wasn’t. After more careful thought, this kibbeh
stalking didn’t seem like Stan’s M.O. The intruder was not demanding anything.
They were spending money to buy or make us food. Was this an act of kindness?
We had a home security system installed
just to be safe.
On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, against my better judgment we went
to a suburban gun shop to look, just look, at filling out the license for a
gun. We had planned to pick up mace and Maglite flashlight anyway. Some
testosterone filled family members had worn me down. Was I getting in the way
of my husband’s “manliness” and right to protect his family? Was he just being
a sissy? The paperwork said it would take five weeks and that we would need to
enroll in gun shooting classes. I guess that could be fun? It is a sport and
maybe it could be a new common interest, something new to share after fifteen
years of marriage. There are no shooting ranges in the City of Chicago so we’d
have to go out to one of the far suburbs, we were told. I grew up in the
country in the Pacific Northwest near Banger Military Base so I’m no stranger
to being around military personnel or knowing folks who actually have bomb
shelters stocked with years of food rations in their backyards. But seeing these
guns, NRA posters, and all of the law enforcement gear and civilian dooms day
prepping equipment, especially the imposing featured M&P 22 semi-automatic
assault rifle display, gave me chills down my spine. Most of the items in the
store were dusty. With all the legal restrictions on what they could and
couldn’t sell, business was slow for this store that was too close to the city
border. Much of the inventory seemed to be antique revolvers, Smith &
Wesson and Glock nine-millimeter handguns. I looked at an old Colt 45 in a
glass case and thought about my own grandfather who had safely guarded his
family motel and trained my mother to be an expert rifle marks woman on
recreational hunting trips. My mom knows how to tie sailors knots too from her
years of Scouting. None of this was passed on to me.
I certainly couldn’t see myself
using a gun. I know I would panic. I imagined Mitch with a gun, my husband who is
always on the cell phone for his real estate business and easily distracted and
who chronically leaves things on the roof of his car and drives off. Earlier
that week he left his new cell phone on the roof when he went to pick up family
members from the airport. Once he drove off with a box of our taxes on the roof
that were subsequently scattered into a busy intersection. No, he would surely
hurt himself and leave it somewhere where the kids could find it. This was a
very, very bad idea. I shouldn’t have even walked in the store. They had a
Black Friday sale on flashlights but were out of mace. I could use the
flashlight while walking the dogs anyway. We would have to go to a sporting
goods store to buy “bear mace” for joggers.
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving at 11:45am the kibbeh stalker returned. They
broke into our yard and
left, of all things, a bag of turkey soup. Coincidentally this happened right after
all our holiday guests left, Mitch had gone to work, and I had just finished
donating a large batch of our turkey soup to one of the sober living residences
(we had reached the post-Thanksgiving turkey leftover threshold). I made Mitch
race home and call the police. Again, skeptical officers arrived and told us we
must be on a mistaken food drop off list from our church. We told them we don’t go to church. They
advised us to post no trespassing signs. Apparently, if you do not explicitly
state “no trespassing” it is not against the law to walk into a private
enclosed backyard. They suggested we put locks on our gates; that we were
basically asking for it if we don’t bother to protect ourselves. So off to Home
Depot I went. After the 4th mystery package I was convinced this was
not
a friendly gesture.
We decided it was time to let our
neighbors know. I made up fliers with a picture of one of the packages and asked
if anyone had information on the “mystery gifts.” I listed out the facts and dates
of the four “break ins” and Mitch, Midori, and I went knocking door to door to
inquire if our neighbors knew anything. We started to notice who had security
cameras, bars on their doors, and even deadbolts on their screen doors. Many of
the owners of these fortified houses reported being broken into in the past,
hence the added layer of security. We also noticed most houses had a spiritual protection
system too - Allahu Akbar signs, crosses, Feng Shui Ba Gua mirrors, and mezuzahs.
No one had any information.
With the idea of gun ownership
safely off the table, I began to think about getting a more imposing watch dog.
After bedtime stories one night, my daughter Midori and I googled “Family
friendly watch dogs.” Shepherds were the top suggestion. Shiba Inus, which we
have, were at the bottom of the list.
When Mitch and I were both single we
each had Shepherd mixes – Mitch had a brown Doberman Pinscher-Shepherd named
Rudy who was his constant companion. Rudy used to run off leash next to Mitch
while he rode his bike along the Chicago’s lakefront and was even welcomed to
drink with Mitch at his old neighborhood bar. Rudy had a very deep bark that
would rise at the end and sounded like the word “Baruch” as in “Baruch Atah
Adonai.” I had a Shepherd mutt named Mahitabel, who I’d named after the 1920s
comic strip about a cat and a cockroach – Archy
and Mahitabel. I was an art student and in to being obscure.
I had recently graduated from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was living on my own on Chicago’s
near west side. It was a spring day and I was walking Mahitabel around a grassy
open park when I heard a rat-tat-tat and everything went into slow motion. I
saw all the kids in the park who had been playing baseball and basketball up to
that point fall to the ground as if they were in a stop, drop and roll fire
drill. I looked to see what they were reacting to and saw a white Chrysler Labaron
with a maroon hard top slowly driving by a row of red brick apartment
buildings. A man was standing up through the sunroof and was spraying the
building with bullets. Not being a seasoned city girl, I did not have the stop
and drop instinct yet. I naively screamed, ran home, locked the doors, and soon
moved to the north side, where I thought I’d be safer.
As the years passed, our family grew
and our work schedules got more hectic. Our dogs correspondingly got
progressively smaller. We had finally settled on Shiba Inus, mostly out of
convenience and partly because they are a cute ancient Japanese breed. My
brother and his wife, who is Chinese American, had adopted a Shiba from a
rescue association and they were so enthusiastic about the breed. I joked that
it seemed like the Asian American thing to do (my father is Okinawan from Hawaiʻi). Although I was leery of the cult like Meetup groups Shibas
seem to require (for some reason, they prefer to play with their own kind),
I’ve trusted my brother to help me with important life decisions, such as cars,
before so we followed his lead.
First came Lola, a sesame with an
impossibly fluffy curly tail who we got at six months of age. We let Midori
name her and she suggested the name after the Dr. Seuss character Lolla-Lee-Lou
who had an obsession with acquiring ever more extravagant tail feathers. Mitch
liked the name because it reminded him of his old punk days and the Kink’s song
“Lola,” which is about a drag queen.
After a season, I projected that
Lola was lonely. She spent her days laying on the arm of our leather couch and
staring out the front window and sighing. We got her a male companion, Bongo, a
redheaded black and tan who was named in honor of Mitch’s former amateur career
as a bongo and conga player. The two Shibas are like cats - quiet, skiddish, aloof,
and stealthy with occasional burst of wild energy where they chase each other
in circles. They are also like rats who have a taste for devouring home decor.
They eschew dog bones and treats in favor of nibbling on drywall, the corners
of all furniture, the stairs, the carpet. During his first six months, Bongo
ate our leather couch that Lola had previously loved. They were both banned
from the living room. But despite their lack of overt affection, and their
quiet assassin tendencies, we have grown to love them.
The Shibas love to dig holes too and
they had progressively destroyed our tiny backyard. In September we finally got
around to putting down new sod and we all took a family oath not to let the
dogs pee or dig in the backyard again. But just this once more I let them out
to do their business. It was Friday, December 14, 2012 during Hanukkah when the kibbeh stalker
paid the next visit.
Bongo, proving he was in fact a
certified watch dog, started barking and growling at our now padlocked back
gate. I raced outside without putting on my shoes. There stood an elderly Asian
women so short that all I could initially see was a band aid on her forehead
and her salt-and-pepper bob pulled up into baby doll ponytail with a red ribbon
on the top of her head. She was trying to open the gate. She didn't speak any
English except to say the word “lock”, pointing at the gate. She reached up
over the fence and handed me a plastic bag with the signature knot and a “Have
a Nice Day!” message printed on the front. I thanked her as if I had never seen
such a gift before. I asked her where she lived and she responded in what I
think was Cantonese, pointing to the north. I realized that I didn’t have the
key on me to open the back gate. In the moment I was wondering what to do as I
stood in my fenced backyard in my now wet socks, she turned around and walked
away. She was shuffling in tan orthopedic sneakers and wearing cranberry high
water polyester pants and a tan long sleeve shirt. She reminded me of my own
late Grandma Kina. She paused for a moment and then stopped to see if our front
door was unlocked.
I carefully undid the knot of the
bag she had given me. Inside were two clear plastic bags containing warm kibbeh
and empanadas.
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| Fifth package left by the "kibbeh stalker" |
