Masked Person's Hour Inside Apartment Sparks 347-Reply Nextdoor Thread
Police have no suspects, but the Barstow Street building's Nextdoor group has four competing theories and a spreadsheet.
WAUKESHA — A masked person spent approximately 60 minutes inside a three-story apartment building on Barstow Street Sunday evening before exiting through a side door and walking north, according to Waukesha Police Department, which has no suspects, no motive, and, as of Wednesday, no plans to comment further than the one paragraph it has already released twice.
The building's private Nextdoor group has filled that silence with 347 comments in four days, 212 of them from residents who do not live in the building but have opinions about its lighting.
"We've ruled out burglary, we've ruled out a prank, and we've ruled out my neighbor's nephew, who has an alibi involving a Culver's shift that ended at 7:40," said Darlene Picha, 58, who lives on the second floor and has posted 61 of the 347 comments, more than any other resident, a fact she confirmed unprompted. "That leaves three theories, and I've ranked them by plausibility in a shared spreadsheet."
The spreadsheet
Picha's document, titled "Barstow Incident Tracker (DO NOT EDIT COL C)," ranks the three remaining theories as: a confused delivery driver who mistook the building for a different address (62% plausibility), a prospective tenant who toured the building after hours without telling anyone (30%), and "something else, TBD" (8%, reserved in case new footage surfaces).
User RBarbara72, who posted the thread's most-liked comment, declined to elaborate on her assertion that the visitor was "definitely scoping for something" when asked what, specifically, there was to scope. She has since posted eleven follow-up comments defending the original claim without adding new information to it.
Doorbell footage shared to the group shows a figure in a dark hooded jacket and a plain black mask entering the building's side door at 7:52 p.m. and exiting the same door at 8:51 p.m., walking at what three separate commenters independently described as "a normal pace, which is somehow worse."
"A normal pace is the least reassuring pace. If he'd been running, at least we'd know he was in a hurry to leave."
— Darlene Picha, Barstow Street resident
Security measures under discussion
The building's property manager, Fox Crossing Residential Management, has not commented beyond a notice taped to the lobby door reminding residents to "please ensure exterior doors latch fully," which 40 commenters interpreted as an admission of fault and 40 others interpreted as unrelated boilerplate.
Waukesha Police Department spokesperson Officer Dale Kowalczyk said the department is treating the incident as a "suspicious person" report, the lowest of four internal classifications, and that no forced entry, theft, or damage was reported by any unit in the building.
"We understand the neighborhood wants answers. We also want answers. We mostly want the hallway light fixture fixed, which has been out since August and is a separate issue the building should address regardless of this."
— Officer Dale Kowalczyk, Waukesha Police Department
That hallway light has become its own subplot. Nineteen comments now concern only the fixture, with one resident offering to buy and install a motion-sensor LED hallway light (paid link) out of pocket if the property manager would simply "say yes in writing."
No resolution in sight
As of Wednesday evening, the thread showed no signs of slowing, having survived two attempts by a moderator to lock it "pending updates" and one 40-comment detour into whether the building's recycling bins are emptied often enough, a topic several residents agreed was "related, somehow."
Picha said she plans to keep the spreadsheet open indefinitely. "Column C stays locked until somebody tells us who it was," she said. "Or until the light gets fixed. Honestly at this point either one would feel like closure."