I left work sometime between 1.30am and 2am on the morning of 16 February 2006. My house is about 3 minutes walk away.
I arrive at my front door. Unlock the top lock. I go to unlock the bottom lock when a man a little shorter than me, dressed in black, jumps from the roofing over the doorway to land behind me.
He pulls a knife and puts it to my throat for a couple of seconds. He withdraws the knife (and never uses it in that way throughout the rest of the robbery), but shows it whenever he needs me to do something.
He puts his hand over my mouth and tells me (in Spanish, obviously) to get on the ground.
I do so, and he takes my cellphone and iPod from each pocket.
He takes the key from my hand and tries to unlock the bottom lock. The lock requires you to pull on the door, unlock it, and then push. He can't do it.
He pulls me to my feet, losing my glasses in the process, and instructs me to unlock the door, which I do.
Once inside, he closes the door, turns the lights on to have a look around, then turns them straight off again (there are large front and back windows which anyone can see through when the light is on).
He leads me to point AA in the sketch, where he removes my football shirt. He uses this as a gag for my mouth.
He takes my hands behind my back, and ties them together with electrical cable, and what appeared to be the type of cable used for clothes irons.
He pushes me to the floor - point BB - where he ties my legs together around my calves. These binds are not done nearly as well as the ones on my hands which are cutting of the circulation to my fingers.
I can hear him go to my bedroom, and comes back with a sheet from my bed. He uses this to blindfold me. The blindfold covers my nose, making it near impossible to breath. He allows me to push the blindfold off my nose with my shoulder.
I lay in this postion - almost a fetal position - for quite some time, maybe an hour/hour and a half, as he takes his time, calmly walking through the house.
I hear him rummaging through my bedroom, then returning to the living room to unscrew the cables that connect the TV and radio to the roof antenna.
The familiar sound of one of the zips of my large travel bags is heard, as it sounds like he puts the TV, radio and playstation in it.
Throughout this time, I have not panicked, strangely calm - and no loss of control of bodily functions - presuming that if I let him take what he wants I'll be relatively fine at the end of it. Besides the initial knife to the throat, I had been given no reason to fear any substantial harm.
Several times he comes to further bind my hands - I find out later using my own socks - and once putting another bind around my legs. Again around the calves, the widest part of the lower leg, and I figure will be easy to remove once he's left. In fact, the leg binds loosen up quite a bit while I'm lying there. At one point when he puts another bind around my hands, I push my legs apart a bit to make it appear as though the leg binds are tight.
Eventually, is begins to sound as though he's cleaned up everything of any worth. He picks me up and carries me to my room - point CC.
Maybe 15 minutes later, I hear him open the door, close it and walk up the path to the front gate.
I figure he's probably taken all he wants, and won't be back, so a couple of minutes after he left I work on the leg binds. This takes no longer than a minute.
I'm on my feet, and am able to use my shoulder to push down the football shirt from my mouth. I blindly stumble to the living room where I sit on the couch and use my thighs to push the blindfold up over my eyes, and finally remove it by violently shaking my head.
My hands are still tied. In my one foolish act, I forget that there are scissors in the house. I contemplate finding a knife in the kitchen, but first have a look around the house at what's been taken, turning on the lights in various rooms with my shoulders.
At this point, I have still not felt truly frightened.
That changes when I here someone coming up the path to the front door. I rush to the living room, hear him struggling with the bottom lock (he didn't lock the door, but you still have to pull, turn the key, and push, as the door has no handle that turns).
Now I am freaking out. There's nothing left in the house except food, my clothes and a few DVDs - not exactly high value on the stolen good market. What the hell could he be coming back for? He's clearly seen all the lights are on, and the intesity of the attempts to open the front door says he's anxious to get in quickly.
I weigh up a couple of options: going to my bedroom and attempt to hold the door shut, or go outside through the back door and hope that there's something outside that I can use to climb the 9 feet walls that surround the property.
I choose the later. I run to the back door, the key's always in the lock, so I unlock it with my hands still behind my back, step outside and unintentionally slam the door behind me. I guess that he might have heard it. The only exit through the front of the property is over a wall which has gaps in it that can be used as footholds. There is nothing in the backyard that I can use to get over the walls into a neighbour's property.
I hide behind the only tree in the backyard - point DD.
As far as I can see through the back window, the attacker hasn't managed to open the front door. However, he can easily climb over the wall on the left of the sketch if he wishes.
The neighbour's dogs are barking at something. This brings out the man who lives their to tell the dogs to shut up. I think about screaming for help, but the chance of alerting the attacker prevents me.
I stay hidden behind the tree for 30-40 minutes. The dogs stop barking. I go to the back door and enter the house having remembered about the scissors. I take the scissors and return to behind the tree to remove the binds on my hands.
Shortly after I go back into the house and try to open the front door. It won't open. I pick up my passport which the attacker has left, and head to the wall, but the dogs start barking. For some inexplicable reason I don't want to bother the neighbours, so I return to the house, find the keys to the gate on the other side of the house, thus not disturbing the dogs.
Through the gate, I go to the front door to find that the attacker has broken the key to the front door in the lock. My glasses are to the right of the door.
I leave the property, and choose not to go the direct route to work (there is a security guard at work at all times) in case I come upon the attacker. My house is near the end of a culdesac, so the only way his car could go is to the left so I decide to go to the right.
It was a wise choice.
I walk through the small park, and turn to the left as I meet the footpath. I turn back and, from behind a bush, see a van coming down the culdesac. It stops at the property to the right of my house. The house there was recently demolished, and a new one is being built. Two men get out. Walk into the constuction site, and take a few things back to the van. I cannot make out what these things are due to the distance, but it's not often that labourers show up to a site at 4.30am. It appears that the construction site is where the attacker left his haul before returning to the my house and, later, calling for transport.
I walk down the new road, walking two blocks down before turning down a road that heads closer to work.
I arrive at work at 4.45am. The security guard calls my supervisor. My supervisor shows up shortly after 5am, and the cops half an hour later. The next six hours are spent giving descriptions to the cops at the house, and then at the station.
A probably incomplete list of what was taken:
Television and stereo - owned by Fundacion Paraguay.
Playstation 2, digital camera, cellphone, iPod, some paua jewellery, my other pair of shoes, the suitcase, my credit card, about NZ$250 in local currency (G1,000,000), and my already broken-beyond-repair discman - owned by me.
Description of attacker
The attacker was very dark-skinned. Not black, but very dark brown. He wore black trousers, possibly jeans but I don't think so, a black t-shirt, black shoes (formal/work shoes, not sports shoes), and a black baseball cap. The cap prevented me from judging the length of his hair accurately, but it was not very long. The attacker was between 175 and 180cm tall. I did not get a good look at his face, except that he had little, if any, facial hair, and had a square jaw.
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