I believe that an employee of Meritage Homes has stolen $7,000 of valuables from my house, of which most is irreplaceable. I believe this is due to the negligence of Meritage Homes Management.
On Tuesday October 31st we closed with Meritage Homes on new home.
I was issued house keys, garage openers, keys to the mail box, and keys to the single garage door, and other items. After closing I dropped off a few of my belongings into the garage. Since the garage openers were not working, I went in through the front door and opened both garage doors from the inside. The house comes with a three car garage. The garage door is split into a two car garage door, and a single garage door. The single garage door is not attached to a garage opener, and it needs to be opened manually, which I did from the inside. I unloaded my belongings which included the missing items, as well as other sports gear (baseball bats, golf clubs, basketball, football, etc…). Before leaving, we had an employee of Meritage Homes come in to touch up the kitchen cabinets. Afterwards I locked up, closing the garage door from the inside, and leaving through the front door, and made sure it was locked.
I did not return until that following Saturday. My brother and I, along with our families moved some of our belongings from his garage. We made two trips and in the evening decided to head back and stay at his house in Glendale AZ, an hour north. My wife and mother-in-law decided to stay back and start unpacking. Since we were unloading everything in the garage, we had opened both garage doors from the inside (garage openers were not working, they had not yet been programmed) Before leaving for the night, and being concerned that my wife and mother-in-law were staying back, I decided to check all the keys and doors, everything seemed fine.
Afterwards I closed the two car garage door from inside and walking out through the single garage door and pulling it down, I check the handle and it was not locked. I grabbed the keys from the inside and tried to lock it, but the keys were not working. I checked the number on the key and the garage door handle, and they did not match. I did not think nothing of it, but did tell my wife to lock the inside door and to contact Christy Rocca, the sale person for Meritage Homes, and have the keys changed.
The garage door handle and keys were changed the second week of November. All this time the garage door remained unlocked, and it had remained unlocked – unknowingly to us – for the first few days after we closed. Even if it was locked, who had the real keys to the garage door?
After we had moved in, we were trying to locate the home phones and they could not be found anywhere. We thought they might have been thrown away mistakenly. On Sunday, November 19th, I was searching for my paintball guns and could not find them. I asked my wife and she said she hasn’t seen them. Then it dawned on me. I started searching for my silver coins, my foreign currency and my baseball cards. I couldn’t find any of it. Then I realized that all these items I had dropped off that Tuesday after we had closed. I hadn’t known about the unlocked garage door, and wasn’t aware of the wrong key. I put one and one together, and realized that someone must have stolen these items.
I informed Meritage Homes, and they said they can’t do anything about it. I reminded them that they were the ones that gave me wrong keys to the garage and it was unlocked all this time. If I had known it wasn’t locked I would not have dropped off my stuff there, and that even if I had known I wouldn’t have been able to lock it because they had issued me wrong keys, and where were the real keys? I told them that I believe this was done intentionally, giving whoever robbed us, the opportunity to walk in without a problem.
They told me to take it up with my insurance company. I’m sorry I don’t have receipts for each baseball card that I had collected back in the 80’s and early 90’s, and I don’t have receipts for all the silver coin that I had collected over a 10 year period, or any of the missing items.
I guess this is my problem not theirs, they already have their money.
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