Our own Monitronics employee Leah Shafer is a Dallas native who never thought much of alarm systems until her house was burglarized. Now a monitored security system is part of her personal sense of safety. These are her words.

A close call made her a believer

“I grew up with parents who locked every door and double checked the windows at night. But that didn’t stop us from getting robbed when I was 14. In addition to big-ticket items, they took all my Wet ‘n’ Wild make-up, a crimping iron, and a pair of my M.C. Hammer pants (hey, it was the 80s). But more than that, they stole my sense of security in my own home.

“So we installed a monitored alarm system. For several years, it was just a fixture on the wall that we didn’t think about too much. But that changed one summer night when we woke up to the beeping of the back door being opened. At 3 a.m.

“We had forgotten to close the garage door and at least two people had been rummaging around in there, moving the lawnmower out into the driveway and trying to use a screwdriver to start the car. Who knows what they were planning on doing once inside the house, but it couldn’t have been good. When they came through the back door and tripped the sensor, that alarm may have saved our lives. They heard it and ran away.

“Thankfully, I’ve never had another instance like that since that hot summer night many years ago, but it instilled in me a belief in the value of arming my system every time I leave the house and at night. Nowadays, I have more valuable things for them to steal than scrunchies: my personal sense of safety has no price tag.”

It’s nicknamed the “silent killer.” It’s odorless, tasteless, invisible, present virtually everywhere, and it can kill you while you sleep. The symptoms of exposure often go undetected because they mimic those of other common ailments.

Every year, thousands of Americans are rushed to hospital emergency rooms for treatment and, worse, there’s new evidence that indicates that what were once considered safe levels of this common gas can irreversibly damage the brains of small children.

What is this deadly gas? It’s carbon monoxide, and as lethal as exposure to it can be, it can also be minimized by following a few simple tips.

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For one Palmyra, Tennessee, family, security means knowing they are protected from fire by a monitored alarm system. Lee and Cristina Szlosek left a comment on our website about their Monitronics security system and how it saved their lives. We called them for the whole story. These are Cristina’s words.

A fire that could have killed my family

“Monitronics saved my family from a fire that happened October 21, 2008, at 2:31 a.m. The house we lived in had a fireplace and we lit it up and went to bed. Around two in the morning, the smoke alarm went off and that’s what woke us up. I would have slept right through the fire without the alarm because I’m such a heavy sleeper. We went in the living room and there was smoke filling the room. It turns out the fire was between the walls.

“I thought my husband was joking with me—I was half asleep. But he was not. That fire was real. We got the two kids and the dog and got outside—Monitronics had called the fire department already. When we walked around the house we could see the flames had already melted the vinyl siding. It was a close call.

“If we wouldn’t have had that smoke detector and you all monitoring it, the Palmyra Tennessee Fire Department would have been picking up bodies that night. I don’t want to be in the house without an alarm system after something like that. You guys saved our lives.”