On a recent Thursday afternoon, Rocio Vela Fuentes busied herself with her two-year-old daughter, pacing from the kitchen to feed her daughter lunch and to the living room to read her books about trains.

Earlier that morning, a knock at the door had startled her, but it just turned out to be a deliveryman.

“I’m jumpy,” Fuentes said.

At the same time a week ago, someone burglarized her home in the Houghton neighborhood on 60th Street.

“We feel violated, our personal information has been compromised, our life has been invaded,” she said.

But instead of remaining a victim, she and husband, Gabriel Zaldivar, decided to speak out to keep it from happening to their neighbors.

Thursday, April 9, was like “another day” for Fuentes. A stay-at-home mom, she left the house at 11:15 a.m. and took her daughter to Storytime at Redmond Town Center. Zaldivar was at Areva in Redmond, where he works as an engineer.

After picking up Easter eggs, Fuentes came home about two hours later.

“I opened the garage door and suddenly I saw the screen door open in the back,” she recalled.

She went inside the house and noticed a cabinet that stores their DVD player and Wii console was wide open. In the living room, wooden pieces from the doorframe were scattered where someone had kicked in the front door to get inside.

According to the Kirkland Police report summary, an unknown suspect(s) stole several electronics, including a laptop, Wii console, and camera, as well as jewelry from Fuentes bedroom drawer and several bottles of wine from Zaldivar’s wine collection. The prowler escaped through the back sliding door. Police report no further leads on the suspect, according to the documents.

It also appeared the suspect had tried to rip out some other electronics, but couldn’t get through all the cables and wiring, which Zaldivar keeps braided.

Fuentes immediately grabbed the phone and drove her daughter down the block to call 911.

“Material things can be replaced, but not the feeling that a stranger is watching you,” Fuentes said, adding, “We want to alert the people in our community that there are prowlers in our area and they are watching us.”

Her family moved to Kirkland last year because they liked the proximity to the parks and the quality of life in the community.

“You think these things happen in bad neighborhoods,” she said, pointing to the poor economy that “pushes people to do these things.”

Since the break-in, they have canceled their credit cars, placed ID theft protection on their social security numbers and had a security system installed.

Now, the family is vigilant of everything, and Fuentes urges her community to be, too.

“We would like to let the people in our neighborhood know that this could happen to them and we need to be alert of our surroundings,” she said, noting that a home also doesn’t need to be empty an entire day or week to be burglarized. “It took me just a trip to run my errands to discover that my home was burglarized.”

Kirkland Police Lieutenant Mike Ursino said residents should also write down the serial numbers from all electronic equipment.

“One big problem is nobody can prove it’s their equipment,” he said, noting residents should also engrave their driver’s license onto electronics in a “secret spot” so if a thief pawns it, police can readily identify the equipment. The Kirkland Police Department has engravers residents may use, he noted.

Fuentes said she doesn’t see herself as being brave for speaking out about what happened to her.

But “the more that people are aware – I hope it will deter these people from prowling our neighborhoods,” she said.

View Kirkland’s Houghton neighborhood on alert in a larger map