I don’t know if it’s actually a legal term, but AFAIK what distinguishes a “home invasion” from an ordinary burglary is that a home invasion is a robbery. Force or the threat of force is used against the occupants. Pushing past the person who opens the door would make it a robbery, in the same way that a shoplifter becomes a robber when they try to shove the loss prevention worker out of the way.
Thanks, all; ignorance fought.
Thanks to everyone for the replies. After some thought, I’m even more convinced it was a home invasion attempt. The video was taken down after the comments section filled with chest thumpers announcing how they would introduce them to their close friends Smith and Wesson, etc, etc. (I’m sure you can guess how this goes). Lots of the Nextdoor crime videos seem to disappear quickly, I suspect due to the threatening comments and inevitable gun arguments that follow.
Several posters mentioned how Nextdoor (and Facebook groups) become self-reinforcing indicators of a fictional wave of crime. I understand how that can happen and ignore the “suspicious person driving slowly” type stuff. But, I have been very surprised at the baseline level of pilferage and opportunistic theft that occurs. I had no idea it was that prevalent. I’m talking about cars opened and ransacked, and relatively valuable stuff disappearing from garages/yards. For a while there was a rash of mailbox thefts (not just missing stuff, but finding multiple boxes open and mail strewn all down the street). Without the website, I would have been unaware of any of this. In the last 3 months, there have been many confirmed (video) instances of intruders at the back door trying the handles, and a smaller number occurring at the front. Two homeowners have arrived home to end up confronting thieves in the act of loading stuff to haul away.
Of course, random theft of stuff from yards isn’t a worrisome problem – just pick up your stuff and keep the garage door down. But the trend of entering back yards and testing the security of multiple homes, breaking and entering, and now attempting to lure homeowners into opening doors at night would (and should) worry anyone. And as such, I’m going to make a few changes around Casa Pullin.
I think a big portion of low-level burglary tends to be junkies looking for something they can sell, although there are occasional deranged lunatics.
Given that the majority of the responses in this thread point out that the evidence points more likely to a burglary attempt, why are you more convinced it was a home invasion attempt?
Everything you’ve described is consistent with either, but burglaries are much more common. So it was probably the more common crime.
Presumably the second guy hiding out of view. That looks possibly like preparation for an ambush if the homeowner had opened the door.
I’m still not sure how that’s supposed to work (the first hoodie guy is unthreatening enough that the homeowner comes out and follows first hoodie guy all the way to the corner of the house so hiding guy can ambush him?)
But, regardless, this being a home invasion doesn’t make a lot of sense: the Bad Guys are willing to jump whomever answers the door, not caring if there’s anyone else inside or next door or just walking down the street who’s going to respond to the yells and screams, but they’re not willing to just walk around back and kick the kitchen door open, because they’re scared there might be people in the house?
Seeing if people are home to set up a burglary seems much more plausible to me.
Having someone scream hysterically on the porch seems like a dumb way to initiate a home invasion. Home invaders shouldn’t want to alert the whole neighborhood to what’s going on. It would (hopefully) not end well for the if the neighbors are peeking out their curtains / dog walker stopped to gawk when the “muscle” shoves the girl and homeowner inside.
'Course, criminals aren’t usually known for their thoughtful problem-solving skills, so …
Not everyone lives in a neighborhood. You could scream bloody murder at my door, and other than us and the dogs, no one is likely to hear you. Rural life is very different from city life.
I disagree that this is a data point that helps differentiate, because burglars would also do this.
If there’s someone there, no reason to let them see both of you. And if there’s someone there, burglars generally have some kind of cover story. They pretend to be selling something or taking a survey or whatever. Sometimes people are going to be home, and you don’t want to immediately make them suspicious. One person conducting surveys alone looks more believable and is less threatening, which is less likely to make the people who are home immediately call the cops and report “two suspicious men ringing doorbells”
I was assuming that burglary was a subset of home invasion. Now that others have made the distinction clearer, I’ll amend my answer to saying that it looks more like a burglary. This is just based on the priors, if nothing else: Burglaries are more common than invasions with the residents present, and so it’s more reasonable to assume that an instance of people attempting to break in is burglary than invasion.