Break-ins reported at homes of two N12 reporters within 24 hours

N12 reporters Almaz Mangisto and Yair Sherki reported break-ins at their respective homes with 24 hours of each other, each detailed in two wildly different stories.

"This morning I woke up with a burglar in a room in my bedroom," Sherki tweeted on Sunday. "It was very scary but apparently nothing was taken."

Unlike Mangisto, who said she had to wait "the longest 26 minutes of [her] life" for police to arrive, Sherki's case ended differently. "I called the 100 hotline and patrol officers arrived within minutes. After a little over an hour they also arrested a suspect whose description matched what I gave them and what a neighbor described in a nearby building that had been visited a few minutes before."

He added that, "I was invited to file a complaint at the station and, later in the morning, a policeman arrived to take security cameras from the area, and a forensic officer who collected findings. Restores the feeling of security."

N12's correspondent for Haredi affairs was quick to clarify that this was not a case preferential treatment because of his status, and that it simply a case of quality police work. 

"To anyone who asks or hints at a VIP relationship: I called 100 and received treatment through them. No last name and no ID number were given initially, that was taken from me only later," he said, adding that "apparently, at some point, one of them knew me, but the relationship was serious from the first minute."

Mangisto, on the other hand, came out of her experience severely disappointed with the police treatment she received while a man tried to break into her apartment on Saturday. 

"I wake up to a horrible noise of a man trying to break through the door to my apartment in Tel Aviv with all his might," Almaz detailed in a Twitter thread on Saturday. 

"I got up in a panic, picked up the phone, ran to the front door and pushed it shut," Mangisto said. "I tried to understand what was happening to me at the moment, I felt like I was in a horror movie that I would soon wake up from." 

"The anonymous man did not stop his actions - he kept trying to break in and break down the door, and enter the apartment while shouting, cursing and threatening my life," she continued, saying that "I knew that if he managed to break in - that would be the end of me, that there was a possibility that I would end my life here or be assaulted." 

"All the most horrible scenarios ran through my head," she wrote.

Regarding her experience with the police, she wrote that "While I'm fighting him with my body so he doesn't break open the door, I call the 100 hotline. I answer the caller, I explain to her that in a few minutes I will run out of strength and the man will break in." 

Police told Mangisto that "'A police car will arrive soon, the police are already on their way.'" 

"Another ten minutes pass - the man continues and even starts disrupting the electrical panel, disconnecting me into a freezing darkness," Mangisto wrote.

"I call the police again, another caller answers me. It turns out that no call was opened at all and there are no details of the incident. Again I hand over the details under pressure, as the caller shouts at me angrily 'Decide already, is the entrance to your building from the right or left ?!'.

Eventually, Mangisto acted on her own and turned to N12 crime reporter Brano Taganya. "Within seconds he had forces on their feet. Suddenly, miraculously, in just a few minutes, I hear the cops arresting the threatening man in a stairwell." 

She concluded her frightening experience with the words "Scary to be a woman, and even more frightening when it's our police."