The End of Violence

I walked the children to the car this morning, as I do each weekday, and they got in the car and we drove away.

Nothing new, nothing different.

Which is what I had planned.

What they didn't see was the pool of blood on the sidewalk that was there last night, right in front of my car, from where a 21-year old man lie, bleeding to death out of his femoral artery, where he was shot, just minutes before.

But that probably makes sense.

I don't know what to tell them and I don't know exactly how to share this with others, or get it out of my head in the light of day.

We've already talked about it, Wendy, my neighbors, the police, and we even joked about it and went to bed and slept soundly, but the fact remains, the kid was shot 100 feet from my front garden and bleeding to death while the bad guys drove off.

The kids were asleep last night when I heard what sounded like a large firework outside my front window. I was doing dishes and it didn't sound like a gun, because I've heard gunfire before and it's always muffled, as its usually far away. This sounded like a firecracker. But then there was shouting and I could see, from my dining room window, a 20-something kid with a shaved head and white tee shirt scuffling with someone else. I didn't see the someone else. But there was shouting and I figured out pretty quick that someone shot a gun, so called 911.

I explained the whole thing to the woman on the phone, play-by-play. A black truck (an Avalanche, which I didn't know at the time) was pulling away from the scene. The shaved head kid was on a cell phone and limping and seemed to have a red splotch covering his white tee shirt on the right side. I figured he was the one hit.

There was also a red SUV, which looked like an Isuzu Rodeo, that was there and stopped during most of this, before heading down the street. I kept telling the woman on 911 that the black truck was still there, had come back, and if the police would get there immediately, they could catch them. I think she was trying to take down everything I was saying. (but the weird thing was, she put me on with paramedics afterward, who already had a call in).

I ran to the living room, still talking to 911, and turned off the lights, trying to get a good look at the kids and see if I could get the license plate of the black truck, which had turned around and was now heading out.

I ran out to tell Wendy what'd happened and by the time I came back in, the police car was pulling up. I ran out the door and saw the kid I thought was shot just had a red graphic on his shirt, but there was someone lying on the ground down the street. The kid on the phone kept yelling, "My friend, they shot my friend."

The police were everywhere. They kept pulling up. I directed the fire engines down to where the kid was and the two others were wandering around, trying to catch their breath. The neighbors all started coming out of their houses and we started gathering in little groups. I asked the guys if they were okay, did they need anything. No.

The kid was lying right outside my neighbor's house and the paramedics were hooking him up to an IV, stripping off his bloody clothes, and getting him onto the gurney. One of the other kids was vomiting into the gutter, from exhaustion?

These were young Armenian kids driving a car well out of my price range. What were they doing in our neighborhood? What the hell happened? They told the cops they were visiting a friend's girlfriend, but they didn't buy it any more than we did. The cops pointed out that there was broken jewelry, a hat on the ground that didn't belong to these kids, and other stuff that showed this was really a fight, and they would guess, probably with something to do with drugs.

There's still really only one kid we know on our block who sells drugs, Andrew, and he's been selling them for 10+ years. He walked by while everyone was standing there, but I don't think he'd be stupid enough to do that if his customers were just getting shot. Wouldn't they finger him?

Our neighbor told us one of the other kids, the shooters, had run into his back yard for a few minutes, which prompted him to call the police. The car apparently came back around picked up that kid and they took off.

While talking to all our neighbors a policeman came up and asked us if we'd stand outside yellow tape. We all looked up and realized they had cordoned off the area we were standing. I didn't know what to do. It was kind of like being kicked out of the party, so to speak.

The cops came to our door, talked to us some more, and we learned the red SUV I saw was stopped and they were witnesses, if you can believe it. They saw everything and then drove away. So I may have done my good deed (imagine how surprised they were when the cops pulled them over as they were driving and asked if they just witnessed a shooting).

The kid who was shot, it turned out, was bleeding to death, and flat lined on his way to the hospital. He was brought back and they said if he died, the detectives would be back asap.

He must still be alive, because we didn't see them.

Around 10:30 I realized there was a pool of blood in front of my neighbor's house. Her lights were on and I knocked and asked if I could borrow her hose. I didn't want my kids to see all the blood. Or the blood to stain the sidewalk, to remind us what'd happened there.

So we talked a bit while I washed.

And the conversation moved away from this and onto that, her termite infestation, her aunt, who'd recently passed away, my kids...

It seemed so normal, though I was watching blood, which looked so black in the light, down the sidewalk and into the sewer.

I don't know if the two can't coexist in my brain, or if I'm so over it that I don't want to think about this.

The second can't be true, because I can't stop thinking about it, but I'm not sure I know how to handle the anger and pain. It's been a long couple months - with layoffs at the office, my foot in a walking cast, and tons of work to catch up on (which is to be expected when there are layoffs).

In the light of day, I walked my children to the car and let them in. We passed by the elements of the fight I didn't see in the night. Someone had been pushed into the irises. There were torn tree branches.

As I opened the door for them to get in, only I could see the bloody footprints which were out of my hose's reach last night. The boy had run up and down the street bleeding, and at 7 in the morning, you could still see the bloody tracks leading up the street.

I grew up in Nebraska, where in a lot of ways, it's more violent in everyday life than here (there's a special breed of men who lurk in bars drinking and looking for their next fight), but seeing this - it's just so harsh, so close, and I want to protect my children from it so badly.