So some of the neighbors got together Wednesday night down on the corner. And shot each other.
You thought this was going to be a feel-good post, didn't you? Well, no worries. There are several things you can still feel good about. For example: (a.) no one died this time, (b.) we didn't actually know the names of any of these people for a change, and (c.) our car wasn't the one decorated with police tape when all was said and done. Our friends across the street are the ones that got to deal with that.
One of the three shootees (probably also a shooter - there were apparently plenty of them) in an attempt to evade the swarming cops, or to at least avoid getting shot some more times, made it five houses down from the location of the shooting. At that point, he jumped through the hedge adjacent to our friends' driveway only to find, to his surprise presumably, barbed wire in there and also a car parked inconveniently on the other side.
The crash when he bounced off their car is what alerted my neighbors to the presence of an intruder. Maybe also the sirens and the pounding helicopter and the glaring searchlights and the guy with the German Shepherd yelling "Follow the blood trail!" outside our house. (That was what alerted us.)
This was Dog TV at its finest. Lila was enthralled.
They caught the guy while he was lying in the driveway next to the car, bleeding from barbed wire wounds on his hands and a gunshot to the leg, and we got to watch all of it from the porch. We even made up a whole pretend conversation between our neighbor and the cop who was taking down his statement. Although we couldn't hear much, it took so long that we assumed by the end they were probably just chatting.
Cop: Alright, sir. Enough about the guy bleeding all over your driveway. So, the monsoon this year - isn't the shortage of rain just so depressing?
Our Neighbor: Oh, wow, I know, right? I'm just positive my potted chiltepines aren't going to make it.
Raphael's just about ready to move out, I think, but Lila and I are concerned that the quality of programming just won't be the same if we leave this neighborhood.
5 comments:
I'm with Raphael. Move. There is less dangerous people-watching in other neighborhoods. God, does your mother read your blog? is she having a cardiac episode? have you invested in kevlar?
Again, I'm laughing out loud. At my desk. At work.
Move or I won't bring your nephews to visit you. Just kidding, I probably will, just make sure this isn't happening around that time.
That's assuming you want your nephews to visit.
Something similar happened in our neighborhood when we lived in East Palo Alto, only we didn't see any of it because none of our windows faced the street and we were crouched down listening to the sirens with our three-month-old baby so we wouldn't have seen anything anyway. We moved out between that shooting and the next one. I kind of miss the strange men who used to knock on our apartment door. But not really. The drug dealers who lived next door to our new apartment were relatively nonviolent. I didn't like the cockroaches they let infest their place and move over to ours, but at least none were armed.
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