And the housesitter is instructed to answer the landline if it rings. You don’t want a call to roll over to voicemail and give the caller the idea that there isn’t someone there.
Unless you’ve got a heavily armed Home Alone defense set up. 
j/k.
Fuck cultural relativism - this is just flat-out fucking evil.
There are still funeral/death notices in the newspaper or something? Is that the problem?
This ^ just needed repeated.
Around here, the paper will generally carry only the death notice, along with the funeral home. One usually needs to visit the website of the mortuary to find the extended obituary, which will list the time/place of the service. You can, however, pay to have the extended obituary published in the paper, and that’s still the best way to let the public know that a person has passed and when respects can be paid.
Any burglar whose MO includes funerals knows the name and url of the local funeral places. It’s not hard.
A police officer was doing that around here a while back.
Hell, I subscribe via email to the obit notices of a couple of the local funeral homes. That’s how I generally learn of the passing of friends and acquaintances.
She was later sentenced to two years in prison.
When things like this happen, a pro-police guy I know will tell you that it is further proof we do not pay police enough.
The police who were committing overtime fraud and detail fraud in Massachusetts were pulling in $150k-$200k before the fraud.
One of my neighbors has pulled in over $300k in some recent years.
She was a corrections officer for the county jail, a significant difference from being a police officer, though she did work law enforcement for the sheriff’s office and therefore could be accurately called a sheriff’s deputy. But she wasn’t a police officer who was out patrolling or acting as a first responder.
I think that’s important to point out the difference, because saying she was a police officer is implying that she was given the responsibility of keeping people in the community safe, when that wasn’t her role. If someone given that responsibility was instead robbing people at their most vulnerable, it would be even worse. The truth is bad enough.
Splitting hairs, but at least in some states (Florida for example) a prison corrections officer is considered a first responder and receives benefits as one. Also (at least in Florida) a corrections officer is given priority if they apply for work with the local police department.
(My son is in corrections in Florida)
Splitting hairs of me splitting hairs, those hairs are going to be microscopic!
(But good info. 
)
It seems like there have been some horrifying knife attacks lately. They never make a frontpage headline but are just as shocking to me.
Dedicated thread on topic:
Terror makes people uncoordinated and panicky.
And, they’re not going to line up to confront you as you run away.
Also, knives are just scarier IMHO.
A knife makes somewhat less noise than a gun, so a crowd cannot identify the attacker as easily. And people are more likely to be rushing to help the victims rather than subdue the attacker.