It wasn’t the crime of the century, except to the victims.

Technically, it was a “property crime,” but it had serious secondary effects

The Kenosha News on Feb. 13, 1970, reported a house fire caused damage estimated at $10,000 to a house at 5706 36th Ave.

“Footprints leading to and from a rear fence, and broken glass in a rear door, indicated that burglars had been in the building before the fire occurred,” the story said. It also said the resident of the home, Lillian Tennessen, was out of the city.

So you’d think no one was injured, right? But Mrs. Tennessen, though she was not in the building at the time, was devasted by the fire.

And the rest of the family was also profoundly affected. Mary Hubbard, of Albuquerque, N.M., the daughter Lillian Tennessen was visiting when the fire occurred, still thinks about it on the anniversary of the fire.

This year she wrote a letter to the burglars. Since they were never caught, she doesn’t know who they are, so she sent the letter to the Kenosha News. Here’s part of it:

“You must have found cash, and to cover up what you found, you lit a fire under her dining room table. At 5:30 a.m. a neighbor noticed the fire and called the Fire Department. By the time they got to her home, the fire had burned though the floor and the ceiling; it was so hot it melted the telephone in the dining room and melted the radio on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

“Why did you have to light a fire? ... When my mom came back and saw the damage that the fire had done to her home, she was never the same. She had to live in a nursing home after that and passed away three years later. This selfish act was like a death sentence. Without her home, she was lost.”

In an interview, Hubbard said she could have written the letter any year, but now she figures the burglars are probably 57 or 58 years old. The police, she said, figured the crime had been committed by teenagers.

“I would just like to ask them, ‘Would you like this to happen to your mother?’”

Barbara Tennessen, of Kenosha, remembers calling her mother-in-law to tell her about the fire.

“She came back on the train and we took her to see her home,” Tennessen said. “Once she saw the damage it was like shock. It just wiped her out. She was very saddened by it and never was the same after that.”

Lillian Tennessen, 73 at the time, had been a widow for five years before the fire. She had seven children and 21 grandchildren. She was a frequent letter writer and was known for remembering dates, not only of her own family’s events, but also those of friends and neighbors. After the fire, Hubbard said, Tennessen didn’t even remember her children.

“Her home was really her security after my dad died,” said Hubbard. “She did fine the first five years until the break-in.”

She never lived in the house again. She moved in with a son and daughter-in-law in Kenosha for a while, then moved to Shady Lawn East, a nursing home. She died three years later.

Vandals and burglars never think of the consequences. They never consider that what’s nothing to them might be something to someone else, might even be everything to someone else.

They probably have no idea what they really did that night. They think they broke in, trashed a house and set a fire. It was a lot more complicated than that, and 40 years later, those burglars might appreciate some of those complications. Forty years ought to be long enough for them to find something or somebody to care about.

And if they’re lucky, what they care about won’t be ripped away from them by somebody who breaks a window, sets a fire and leaves without giving it another thought.