Why I’m So Passionate About Your Security

Kathy Sizemore’s childhood experience with burglary ignited her passion for providing families with real home security.

Why did I choose to become involved with the family business of security?

Growing up in Anaheim, CA, my childhood home wasn’t in a traditionally bad neighborhood, but it was on the border between residential and commercial property. There was often a lot of activity going on, which made it easy for people who didn’t belong to go unnoticed and commit crimes. As a result, my childhood home was broken into three times during my growing up years. Our house was burglarized for the first time when I was in third grade. Like many typical “latch key” kids of the 1980s, I was the first person to arrive at home at the end of the workday, which led to me being the first to discover the scene of our burglarized home. I will never forget the feeling of terror when finding our front door unlocked and left ajar, entering our house to find drawers and cabinets opened with the contents thrown around. Once I realized that someone had broken into our home, I ran outside, and not knowing what to do, I sat alone and scared on the curb for two hours until my parents came home.

After this first burglary, my dad took action and went down to our neighborhood Radio Shack and purchased a DIY alarm. This alarm solution was a sleek brown box that detected motion. It plugged into the wall in my parent’s room and sat on my mom’s nightstand. If someone were to walk in front of the box, a big red bell in the attic would ring, notifying us. Every morning when I left for school, I would turn the alarm on, and every afternoon when I arrived home, I would turn it off.

My Dad’s Radio Shack DIY solution was not foolproof. It was often prone to false alarms. I will never forget the terror I felt as a child the first time I arrived at the front door of my home and hearing that red bell ringing. Many panicked questions went through my mind. Do I go inside? Do I run and hide? Do I wait for my parents to get home? I remembered my school teachers teaching us that we were to call 911 if it was an emergency, and we needed help from the police. I ran across the street to a shopping center and used the nearest payphone to call 911 to report our home had been burglarized because the alarm was ringing.

Officers from the Anaheim police department came out right away and investigated. The responding officers discovered that there was no actual burglary, most likely a fly had set off the motion detector. It was a false alarm. They called my parents and told them that they had to leave work and come home because they could not leave me unattended. My dad wasn’t pleased about having to leave work early and losing pay. He told me that from then on, I was not to call the police first if I heard the alarm bell ringing. Instead, I was first to go inside and look around to confirm that a burglary had actually happened.

The terror I felt the first time I came home to the ringing alarm bell, and I realized that I had to go in the house to investigate, outweighed the previous experiences. Fortunately, most of the time that I heard that bell ringing, it was a false alarm. It did finally get to the point where I’d come upon the ringing bell, and I would laugh as I walked through our home looking for the “burglar.”

Intruders burglarized my childhood home two more times while I was growing up. The second time my dad discovered it. The third and final time, I found it. A broken window and the opened front door very clearly gave the burglary away. My dad’s DIY alarm solution did nothing to ward off intruders or protect us from crime. After many false alarms, it was deemed an annoyance by our neighbors and disabled.

When Chris and I started dating, he shared with me about his family’s security business. I was amazed by the alarm monitoring concept: “You mean when the alarm goes off someone knows right away and calls the police for you? You don’t have to go inside, find the burglar and call the police yourself?” I was in 100% and joined the business helping with installs before we even married.

I know how it feels to have my home burglarized;

I’ve experienced the inconvenience and anxiety caused by false alarms;

I understand the trauma of discovering that someone has violated your space and stolen your valuable belongings.

That trauma is my why. It’s why I work to install the highest quality security installations, so our customers don’t have to be inconvenienced, anxious, or afraid when it comes to their security. It’s why I custom design every client’s security system to their unique, individual needs and install a comprehensive system designed to detect intrusion the instant an intruder attempts to violate the perimeter of your space. It’s also why I encourage every A-Bell client to enroll in 24-hour central station monitoring, so their loved ones never have to experience the vulnerability and fear of discovering a burglary all by themselves.