I’ve witnessed a few horrible things. They pale in comparison to what a friend of mine who lived in NYC on 9-11-2001 has seen, and they’re nothing compared to things a lot of my family members have been through, but that’s another post.
Don’t read this if you’ve got your own traumatic memories you’d rather not revisit.
Once when I worked in downtown Seattle I was walking from a very upscale, skyscraper-area to where my office was located in Pioneer Square (also known as Park-Benches-for-the-Homeless-Town), and I was walking through an area I affectionately think of as Crackville (2nd Ave and Pike, or so). I went past a small parking garage, maybe three stories high, and there was a crowd of people gathered around, looking at the roof of it. That was when I noticed the sidewalk around it was roped off with police tape, and there was a body lying on the sidewalk covered in a white sheet. I saw a cop on the roof of the building. I didn’t stop to try to find out what happened–I just figured someone had jumped off the building or been pushed. I was almost as disturbed by all the people standing around staring as I was the fact that someone had died.
Once I was crossing a four-lane street at a T-intersection, and someone on the street I was walking along was turning left onto the street I was crossing, and would have hit me in the crosswalk, but instead they hit a motorcyclist who was coming at them head on. In their defense, it was rainy, and the motorcyclist had come around a car that had stopped in the street to pick someone up. I hid my face, but not before I managed to see the motorcycle hit the car and the rider go flying through the air. It was one of those slow-motion moments, like when I saw a big truck run over a dog, right in front of me. I was expecting him to be dead or all bloody, but fortunately he was fine. Or at least ok enough to get up and start cussing out the driver of the car. So I kept walking.
The worst, though, was when I saw a guy get killed with a skateboard. OK, I didn’t actually see it–I heard it.
My husband and I were in the U-District, on the Ave, in Seattle. He’d gone with me to some used music stores to browse for cds. We walked up to the intersection of 45th, trying to see if there was any stores past it we should check out. We were waiting for the light to change when we heard a loud *CRACK*. It sounded just like gunfire. (I’ve heard gunfire on city streets before, having lived in a gang neighborhood.) We looked across the street and I could see a man lying on the sidewalk–all I could see were his legs sticking out from a store entryway area. But my husband had seen him get hit–someone hit him over the head with a truck of a skateboard (the metal part with the big bolt, that holds the wheels on the board). Daniel saw it happen, and saw three guys ride away on skateboards.
The light hadn’t changed yet, but I immediately asked him if he had his cell phone, and he immediately ran across the street with it. The victim’s girlfriend was already on her cell calling 911. A cop just happened to be driving by and someone flagged him down. He pulled out his pad and started asking questions, and Daniel told him the guys who did it had just taken off down the street and around the corner, but he wouldn’t listen to him. I’d stayed on the other side of the street, as there were people all around and I wanted to stay out of the way. I also didn’t want to see any blood or gore. An ambulance just then happened to drive by and someone flagged it down as well. Daniel left when he realized the cop wasn’t going to do anything, and we went home.
I kept checking the news to see if the guy had lived. He did for a couple days, and I guess in the ambulance had said a few words, but quickly slipped into a coma. I was planning on bringing some flowers by the hospital he was in when I found out he’d died.
There were a lot of stories in news outlets about it, I followed it pretty closely online. And most of them were inaccurate. They did mention the guy’s family owning a Greek restaurant in Seattle, so I sent them a card. His mother ended up calling me, and that was the worst 30 minute conversation I’ve ever had. She was practically hysterical in her grief, and she wanted to know if we’d testify at the sentencing of the perpetrator–they caught the guy, and he pleaded guilty to some charge that would only give him a couple years in jail. The story as I know it was that he and two other guys were skating in the street and wouldn’t move for the victim’s car, and the victim got out of the car to argue with them, when the guy hit him over the head with his skateboard. The mother wanted me to say some words at his sentencing in the hopes that it would get him more jail time, I guess, but since I didn’t actually see anything, just heard it, I couldn’t. And my husband didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
She also wanted to hear all about everything that’d happened. I shouldn’t have told her anything, I guess, but I told her what I knew. It was horrible. She was so distraught.
I’ll never forget the sound that skateboard made against bone.
