A young couple from Michigan decided to take an extended vacation by car culminating in a visit to Portland. Adrian Hammerle had lived in the city from 2017 to 2020 and he was eager to show it off to his girlfriend Eleora Gouine. They were both thinking of the trip as a combination vacation and scouting effort. If they liked what they saw in the city, maybe they would move there.

“Yeah, I mean, Adrian was talking it up. He was so excited to bring me. I was so excited to go, and I mean we’ve had some people be like, oh, yeah, there’s a lot of homeless over there, so just be careful. And I was just like, oh yeah, we’ll be fine. I’m not too worried,” said Eleora.

They arrived and checked into their hotel and the next morning they decided to head out and find some coffee. That’s when things started to go downhill.

“And when we got to the car, I looked down at the ground and I saw that there was a bunch of glass, and I was like, oh, weird. OK, and I went to go open the door and saw that the window was smashed to pieces. And at that moment, I was like, oh my, someone just broke into our car, and I was looking around the car to see what was stolen,” said Eleora.

The thieves had taken a Nintendo Switch video game, but their camping gear was still there.

They covered the back window with plastic film and decided on a new strategy. They would park the car overnight on the top floor of a multi-story garage, thinking thieves probably wouldn’t get around to cars that far out of the way. A couple days later as they were preparing to leave, they found out they’d been wrong.

“So as I’m coming from the elevator and walking through the door and whatnot, I noticed the film that we put over to cover the broken window, initially, was cut through, and then as I was walking around the vehicle, just about every single window was shattered besides the windshield and our stuff that was in the vehicle, from her coloring books and stuff like that and pens, that are all just scattered all over the place and just about everything that we had in the vehicle, which is a little more than we had the first time we were broken into, because we’re about to leave. Just about everything was stolen,” said Adrian.

When they told the parking attendant at the garage what had happened, he laughed and told them it happened all the time. I’m sure it does but it’s still not funny. Also, why did the thieves need to smash all of the side windows of the car when the back window was already broken and covered with plastic. They’ll either have to get insurance to replace those (perhaps with some kind of deductible) or they’ll be stuck coming up with a few hundred dollars per shattered window to replace everything themselves. Either way it will be a hassle and they’ll be without a car for a couple days.

Because they were supposed to leave that day, there was nothing they could do about their car windows. They covered them with film and sat on dirty clothes to avoid being cut by broken glass they might have missed. They drove 30 hours back to Michigan with no windows.

As you would expect, their feelings about Portland aren’t nearly as warm as they once were. Adriane told KATU 2, “It’s gotten so bad, but it’s a lot different than what I’m used to, what I was used to.” He says not only will he and Eleora not be moving there, he doesn’t think they’ll ever return to the city. Here’s the KATU 2 report.