Death Follows Me

Yesterday I passed a house that was surrounded by police tape.  There were police cars, officers, and a big ol' van all stationed outside, and I wondered what on earth happened.  I mean, especially since it was about a block (or less) from my house.  That's just unsettling.




I went home and looked at the PD's website, and I saw there had been a couple of calls from that block in the last 48 hours, but it didn't seem like anything that would have anything to do with the whole property being roped off.  Or a van that looked suspiciously like it might be a mobile lab or something to cart a dead person away.  (Note:  All my information about crime scenes comes from TV, so I don't know what that van was for.  At all.)

This morning I found out that someone had been killed, and it was actually related to one of those calls from the previous days.  Which was weird.  And sort of unsettling.

Especially when I realized that this is the second time someone has been murdered just down the road from me.

The first one was at midnight on my birthday a few years ago.  I was in bed watching a movie and I heard a "pop," followed by other "pops," and it sounded like fireworks.  Except that fireworks have a pattern to their sound, and this was more like ... POP ... POP POP POP ...................... POP ... POP.

And I knew it was a gun and it was close enough that I'd heard it.  The next morning I looked at the local newspaper's website and found out that a guy had gone out to near the supermarket down the road and started shooting into cars.

I had another near-death experience (hardy har har) when I was taking my brother home one evening.  There had been a guy shot at the intersection just half a block from where my brother lived, which also wasn't that far from my house.  I almost got T-boned by a police car that hadn't put on his sirens.  It was a drug-related shooting, and someone came up (as I recall) and shot the guy in his car.

Oh right, and then there was the morning I woke up late and decided not to go to Akihabara like I'd planned to.   My DVD player died a day or two prior, and I thought I would go get a new one.  That was the day that a whole bunch of people got run down with a truck and stabbed by a guy who just wanted to kill some people.

To be fair to myself in that last case, I was nowhere near Akiba at the time.

I don't think this would be weird if I lived in a ghetto somewhere, or even in a crime-ridden city like Detroit.  But I live in places where violent crime is low, and crimes have a tendency to be property crimes (theft, robbery) or else the violent crime that does happen is sort of related to the college atmosphere (rape, assault).  Murder is low.  This is a fairly nice neighborhood full of retirees.  Where people say hello to you on the street and neighbors actually know each other.

Just ... yeah, a little unsettling.