At the last neighborhood association meeting in January I was somewhat skeptical about a police officer's description of "party crews" and tales of vacant homes being used to host raucous parties- unfortunately what I witnessed down the street on the 4100 block of Citrus Way early this morning on two occasions erased any doubts about their existence. 

 The first incident was around midnight or so- I heard a few people outside just talking for a while and dismissed it as a neighbors' family staying up late but soon afterwards a few people talking gave way to many more people not talking but yelling and when I looked out the window there were several groups of young people, maybe 20-30 in all, walking down the middle of the street, headed to cars I'd never seen parked on the street before, followed shortly by cars racing to get out. Time to call the cops, I think- turns out someone had already called and a patrol car with its lights flashing was giving chase. With this disturbance over I went back to sleep but was awakened by my dog's barking just before 3:30- I recognize a parked car and one or two driving past as belonging to the crowd from midnight but this time these people were quieter and it wasn't as first clear just where they were headed; the current crop of neighbors haven't had any large or noisy gatherings I could blame this on.

I went outside to look down the street and noticed an unfamiliar faint light in a bedroom from the vacant house a couple of doors down across the street and could just  barely see people walking up the driveway to an otherwise dark house.  I wasted no time in calling the police and maybe five minutes later a patol car with its spotlight on was pulling up and once again a (smaller) crowd of people were headed back to their cars; no one was running, they didn't seem to be too worried about being arrested, strange as that sounds.

  After the crowd had left I went out to get a better look at what had happened to the house, the most noticeable change from the street was that the 'for sale' sign in place for the last several months had been pulled out and tossed aside to minimize suspicion. According to the officers things weren't too bad inside, thankfully the party was fairly short-lived. They said that if the party had gone on the house would have been trashed...