The Chance to Avoid
Our founding principal — a former prosecutor who handled home invasion cases and now volunteers as an interior firefighter — wrote about the recent arson attack on Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence as a moment to reflect on what’s often overlooked in home security and life safety — and how layered protection begins with quietly effective fundamentals.
When an arsonist broke into the official residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and ignited a fire with improvised incendiary devices, multiple failures in both security and life safety were laid bare.
The attacker gained access and set a fire while the family slept. Smoke alarms — if present and functioning — apparently failed to wake the sleeping occupants. The Governor’s security detail, while credited with alerting the family once the fire was discovered, was unable to prevent or contain the attack in time to stop the resulting damage. And the perpetrator — despite having breached the residence, started a fire, and fled — was not apprehended at or near the scene.
A more complete review of those events rightly belongs to those with access to all the facts. But one thing is already clear: it wasn’t cutting-edge technology or elite protocols that ultimately protected the governor and his family.
It was a closed door.
A closed, fire-resistant door slowed the spread of smoke and flames just long enough for the family to escape — a basic, passive safety feature that likely saved lives. It’s a stark reminder that residential security and life safety begin with the fundamentals.
But in a world of evolving risks, fundamentals alone are not enough.
Today, an individual’s professional, civic, and personal affiliations can meaningfully reshape their risk profile. Public figures, business leaders, and those associated with prominent institutions often face risks not tied to their personal conduct, but to the broader causes, beliefs, or organizations with which they are aligned. In a landscape where perception can provoke action as readily as reality, recognizing how visibility and affiliation alter exposure is critical. Events like the fire at the Shapiro residence highlight how quickly assumptions of safety can be overtaken by targeted intent. Modern protection strategies must reflect these shifts—before threats become events.
A layered approach — combining strong physical measures with appropriate technology, thoughtful design, and a commitment to regular maintenance and timely upgrades — is essential to a resilient safety and security posture that reflects today’s threat landscape rather than yesterday’s assumptions.
Are Security Failures Hiding in Plain Sight?
For many ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families, residential security systems create a false sense of comfort, especially when those systems are imperceptibly degrading over time.
We have routinely encountered properties with:
Cameras displaying low-resolution images that are useless in critical moments.
Smoke detectors that are isolated units incapable of triggering a home-wide, monitored alarm.
Perimeter sensors prone to failure or long-since compromised.
Networking infrastructure not designed to handle today’s cyber threats.
These gaps in protection can compromise a household’s ability to detect, respond to, and contain or repel a threat.
Incidents like the Shapiro residence fire highlight just how real these types of risks are — and raise critical questions every homeowner should be asking:
Are smoke detectors operational?
Are they integrated into a system capable of alerting residents across the home — or emergency responders — in time?
What is the status of perimeter sensors and other security measures?
Are legacy systems quietly undermining today’s security posture?
Modern Security Assessments Are Holistic and Forward Looking
A proper residential security assessment is not simply a cataloging of outdated hardware; it’s a process that produces a strategic, cost-effective plan for strengthening both security and life safety that is designed specifically for the property and its occupants. Done properly, this process considers:
Fire doors, compartmentalization, and other fire protection strategies.
Smoke detection, monitoring, and alert systems.
Physical security hardening, including perimeter protections, access systems, surveillance, and intrusion detection.
Cybersecurity protection for home networks and IoT-connected devices.
Emergency response protocols for residents, staff, and local responders.
Discreet monitoring solutions that maintain privacy while increasing readiness.
The operational life of existing systems and planned upgrade cycles.
The Four L’s: Lighting, Landscaping, Locks, and Laminate
No amount of cutting-edge technology will ever be a complete substitute for sound security fundamentals:
Lighting plays a critical role in deterrence — but that doesn’t mean permanently turning night into day. The goal is a balanced system: ambient lighting that eliminates hiding places and signals occupancy paired with powerful motion-activated lighting that reacts to movement and floods key areas when needed.
Landscaping provides natural beauty, but it can also create vulnerabilities. Overgrown trees and ivy-covered trellises can serve as improvised ladders to second-story windows, while dense hedges and poorly maintained foliage can offer concealment for someone surveilling the property — or lying in wait.
Locks — whether physical or electronic — only provide meaningful protection when they are properly selected, correctly installed, and consistently maintained. But even then, their effectiveness depends on strict key control. Lost keys, shared access codes, or poorly managed credentials can silently undermine even the most advanced locking systems.
Laminate, a protective film that strengthens glass against shattering, applied to glass doors and windows is an increasingly overlooked element of residential security that delays an intruder’s ability to gain entry and buys precious time for detection, response, or escape.
These elements may seem basic, but time and again, it is the basic elements that make the difference.
Assembling the Right Expertise
As a boutique firm with a global network of specialized experts, we don’t operate on a common large-firm model of assigning the available employees who may have some, but not all, of the expertise a situation demands.
Instead, we purpose-build teams comprised of formally integrated partners — trusted professionals who operate as seamless extensions of our firm. These colleagues are subject-matter experts selected not for proximity, but for precision, and they bring the highest caliber of experience available anywhere:
Former federal agents who have led, evaluated, and enhanced protective operations for government and private clients.
Technologists who have secured the residences of former U.S. presidents and other high-value private homes using state-of-the-art motion detection, surveillance cameras, and both perimeter and interior intrusion detection systems.
Cybersecurity specialists who protect the networks of some of the most targeted individuals and organizations in the world.
We lead, coordinate, and integrate the expertise of our partners into a unified solution, ensuring that our clients benefit from deep specialization, high-touch service, and cost-efficiency that larger, traditional firms often struggle to match.
Our approach brings every element of security — physical, digital, and operational — into coordinated alignment to help protect our clients’ safety, property, and privacy.
A Closing Thought
The fire at the Shapiro residence is a reminder that estate security is not static, and risk often feels theoretical — until it isn’t. Security failures often hide in plain sight, until they become obvious in the worst possible way. As affiliations, visibility, and perceptions evolve, so too does the nature of the threats, often in ways that conventional assumptions about safety fail to anticipate.
A proactive home assessment is one of the most impactful investments an UHNW family can make — not simply to identify vulnerabilities, but to produce an actionable roadmap for addressing them. It’s a practical step toward safeguarding life, and peace of mind.
Jetty Partners welcomes the opportunity to help families take a discreet, methodical look at their security and life safety posture — and develop a plan that reflects today’s threats, tomorrow’s challenges, and the need to get the basics right.
