The Story

“I grew up in Missouri and you always get crickets in your house. And they’re very irritating and annoying and it’s really hard to find them,” McMahon laughed. “And at the same time they had started a program at Reed Park over here with blue flashing strobe lights. So I looked that up and discovered that blue strobe lights prevent you from sleeping, they use them in warehouses and such like.

“So, I thought ‘blue strobe light, cricket, cricket chirping’ and if I put those two things together and add some kind of motion detector, I might have something,” he said.
McMahon lives on Lincoln Blvd, a stone’s throw away from Reed Park and he says that the unpleasantness they have to deal with is relentless. He explains that because the courtyard roadway was raised decades ago, none of the buildings can install gated parking. Consequently, he and other residents and neighbors have frequently been confronted with a homeless individual when walking to their vehicles.

He talked of one instance where over $20,000 of items were stolen from locked storage in his building’s garage. This was the tipping point for McMahon as he was exasperated by the lack of action taken by law enforcement. “One night they broke into our storage room, which used to be the laundry room and it had been there since 1961 and no one
had ever broken into it. But they broke into it. And they stole everything,” he said.
He says that they were able to get images of the perpetrators and even the license
plates on their vehicle and using his own resourcefulness, he was able to pinpoint the
location of the suspects to the Lakewood area.

“I have a lot of law enforcement in my family history,” he smiled, adding, “Going all the way back to my ancestors in Ireland.” He said that shortly after that, he saw all the stolen items appear on the marketplace app Offer Up, all with “the same address that this car is registered to.” “It’s not PD’s fault,” he said. “Or maybe it is, I don’t know. The city attorney can’t afford to prosecute. They [the perpetrators] have no assets … I say ‘you can’t do anything, but it’s over $20,000 worth of stuff. We’ve got serial numbers.’ They said ‘I’ll just take a report’ and then suggested I sign up for the arrest authorization program, big wow.”
Needless to say, all of McMahon’s neighbors felt equally as frustrated and as head of the HOA for his building, he felt compelled to try and figure out some sort of solution.

“Everyone had confidence in the project, except for me,” he laughed. McMahon went on an ad-hoc crash course in building circuit boards and even carpentry and developed the first prototype that was fitted inside the garage’s storage units. And then when he and his wife reviewed CCTV footage a few days later, they found to their complete surprise that it had worked, very effectively, on multiple occasions.

Individuals who had come to the secluded and confined space of the open parking garage to either take drugs, pass out or defecate, or more likely a combination of all three, were made to feel uncomfortable and ill at ease and, unable to stop the light and the sound, eventually decided it might be a better idea to just move on. “Sourcing the original components was the first massive hurdle to overcome. The chirper came from a child’s toy, but it didn’t chirp for long enough, so that had to be addressed,” he said. Then there was a problem with overheating, so that had to be addressed too. And then they saw someone attempting to disable the device by spraying water onto the speaker and even poking it with a metal coat hanger. Naturally, McMahon came up for an idea to solve that problem too.

Today, he is making self-contained variations of the device, now officially called the Blue Chirper, but he can’t keep up with demand. “Everyone wants one now,” he said. “But at the moment it’s just me, making these things. And with the time spent building it and buying all the necessary components, I have to charge around $1,000.” But this could all soon change.