Something like this happened to my family when I was in eighth grade. My mom was home alone in the mid-morning when she heard knocking on the door that escalated to banging. She'd been planning to ignore it because she'd been talked into subscribing to a bunch of magazines she didn't actually want by a traveling salesperson a few weeks prior. But the banging was long and loud, so eventually my mom went and peeked outside and saw a teenage boy who was pounding on the door, but he didn't see her.
At this point, my mom called 911 to report suspicious behavior, which (knowing what I know now about cops) feels overly hasty to me. However, I wouldn't say it was the wrong move for the situation, because as my mom was describing what had happened to the dispatcher, she started hearing noises from the upper floor of the house. She was home alone, and the noises were definitely not our cat. So she told the dispatcher, "He's in my house!" Which, especially given the kind of neighborhood my parents live in, led to a cop being sent to the scene immediately.
The cop arrived a couple minutes later and asked my mom (via the dispatcher) whether there was supposed to be a ladder up against the side of the house. (It turns out storing a ladder in your side yard for years on end to free up garage space is not actually a smart move.) My mom said no, and the cop told her to exit the house immediately. My mom ran into the yard.
At this point, the intruder realized he needed to run, too. He came downstairs, made to exit through the front door, saw the cop, and ran through the house to try the back door, at which point the cop ran around the outside of the house to try to stop him there. But the guy couldn't figure out the lock on my parents' back door (it's fiddly and unintuitive), so he came back to the front before the cop even reached the backyard. He ran through the front yard as my mom yelled for the cop. The officer almost caught up with the guy across the street from my parents' house, but her taser jammed, and the guy kept running. Fucking Scooby-Doo sequence of events.
A multi-hour chase/manhunt ensued. Squad cars, a helicopter, way more resources than the situation probably deserved, because the cops might actually try to solve a crime if it happens in a well-off neighborhood to a white lady. They found the intruder eventually, hiding in someone else's garage.
By that point enough of my parents' neighbors had come out into the street and been interviewed by the cops that it had become clear that the guy was walking down the street and breaking into every house he thought was empty, including one other house that wasn't actually empty--a teenage babysitter and a young child had also been home while this guy dud his breaking and entering.
Anyway, it turned out that the intruder was a high school student who had received a suspension for stealing the teacher's edition of the math textbook and had decided to do some burglary to let off steam. I'm pretty sure everything he stole was recovered and returned to the people he stole it from.
