Be Careful Who You Invite to Stay at Your Home

My wife is a loving, caring soul. She’s very much a mother in that she seems to want to adopt every wayward soul she comes across. There are reasons for that, and I love her for it, but she draws the line at letting people stay at our house when we don’t know them really well.

That’s smart. After all, it’s one thing to want to help people, to want to open your home to others, or even try to earn a little extra money by renting out a spare room on something like Airbnb. However, there are risks that come with that.

For example, sometimes the temporary overnight guest is an absolute dirtbag.

A St. Louis man is facing charges after taking the keys to a rental car and a gun while he was a “temporary overnight guest” in the Saint Louis Hills neighborhood on Jan. 17, police said.

According to court records, Ryan Zachary Smith, 33, never returned the vehicle or the firearm. The victim found the vehicle at an address that Smith was known to visit often, and they alerted police.”

[Smith], who was a temporary overnight house guest, took the keys to the rental car in Confidential Victim’s possession and then also took the Confidential Victim Taurus G3 9mm,” police said. “The Defendant then drove off in the rental vehicle.”

Smith was charged with one count of stealing a firearm and a count of stealing a car.

It seems he was also on supervised release and probation for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Nice.

There’s no mention of what the context of the overnight stay was; whether he was a guest via something like Airbnb or whether the victim knew him and opened his home up to Smith. I’m not entirely sure it matters, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s something I’m genuinely curious of. If the victim knew Smith and knew he was a felon, well, that kind of makes the decision to allow him to stay a little more questionable.

Of course, it should be remembered that Smith is only accused of a crime and he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. 

But I can’t help but wonder how many similar cases there are out there. This one stuck out to me because it was a guest, but as I said at the top of this post, we’re hesitant to invite anyone into our home without us knowing them very well, partly due to the fact that stuff like this can happen.

I’d still love to see some actual numbers for this sort of thing, though I doubt anyone out there is tracking it.

With that said, I think it’s unnecessary to belabor the point that you should be careful who you invite into your home as a general thing. I’m not saying that you should never permit someone with a felony into your home, but you should probably at least have some indication that they’ve reformed. If not, at least keep your gun nice and secured in some kind of storage device that doesn’t involve a key they can also gain access to.

But then again, I think most of you guys could figure this out for yourself.