Renda Morrison was three doors away from her house in Severn when she was "dazed" by what she saw for sale in her neighbor's yard.

"What did I say? 'Stop the car,' " Morrison recalled Tuesday, as her daughter nodded.

The yard sale featured Morrison's belongings - items she was about to inventory for police after a burglary that so cleaned out her home even shelving had vanished.

Peddling her rug, her dishes and more was a man wearing her American Poolplayers Association T-shirt, Morrison said. She confronted him, he admitted the items were not his, and she called Anne Arundel County police.

On Tuesday, her neighbor, David Anthony Perticone, 47, pleaded guilty in Anne Arundel Circuit Court to first-degree burglary, as Morrison and her daughter, Wanita Palmer, watched.

"He took my life, the things I have accumulated for the last 25, 30 years," Morrison, 57, said outside the courtroom. Many items were irreplaceable, such as her parents' 25th anniversary goblets and Palmer's baby album, she said.

The odd case, which has been recounted in Reader's Digest, Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird and media outlets worldwide, began last summer. Morrison had been staying with her daughter's family for several months, but they returned periodically to get the mail and check on the place. That's when they noticed the burglary.

Perticone told one TV news crew that he thought the house was in foreclosure and that he didn't want its contents to go to a landfill, but he noted that he wasn't thinking clearly.

He is in a methadone maintenance program for drug treatment. His lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Peter Terech, declined to comment on the case.

Police had returned truckloads of property seized from Perticone to Morrison. So far, Palmer said, they've itemized between $15,000 and $20,000 in missing goods.

Assistant State's Attorney Karen L. Anderson-Scott is expected to seek a jail sentence within state guidelines of nine months to five years. Terech said he will ask for a suspended sentence.