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In the wee hours of Monday, Jan. 23, Mount Pleasant residents were subjected to the unlovely whoops, honks, and screeches of an unleashed alternating-chime car alarm. And it didn’t stop. Those neighbors on the 1800 block of Newton Street NW able to get some shut-eye that night awoke to the same horrible noise in the morning. The source of their agony was a white, low-end Toyota with an apparently malfunctioning security system. (Systems are typically programmed to cease ringing after a certain period.) “It would go ‘beep beep beep’ for five minutes, then it would stop for 10 to 15 seconds. Then it would start up again,” says Byl Herrmann, 43. By afternoon, the car had collected a half-dozen angry notes on its windshield; “almost everybody” at the Stoddard Baptist Nursing Home had also complained, says the home’s desk officer. Calls to police yielded no help. “As long as it was legally parked, there was nothing they could do,” says Herrmann, who called 311 three times. After about 20 hours, the alarm wheezed to a long-overdue death. The owner showed up that night and, according to a neighbor, got a jump from a passing police officer. —John Metcalfe