Neighborhood Shooting

[eema.gray]

Friday night, we both ended up awake at around 3 in the morning.  Ranger Daddy's back was acting up (weather coming in) so he was going to get up for awhile to stretch it out and I woke up as he was getting out of bed.  All of a sudden, there was the unmistakable sound of a semi automatic pistol round being fired somewhere fairly close by.  Just one shot.  All the neighborhood dogs were in (thank G*D) so at first there was absolutely no reaction at all.  RD got up, looked out our bedroom window, didn't see anything.  Left the room.  I heard him messing with the blinds, heard him go out on the balcony.  A few minutes later, I heard police cars and, shortly after that, police dogs barking up a storm.

The rest, I learned (and saw) the next morning.  Our building is on the edge of the complex property.  There's a fence, and then a pair of quadplexes, the owner of which has spent most of the summer rehabing (we have a bird's eye view over the fence from the third floor).  Ranger Daddy being the intrepid and utterly shameless observer that he is, propped a window open and listened in on pretty much everything that transpired.  It appears that husband and wife got into a fight.  At some point, the husband whipped out a pistol and fired a shot, then attempted to run away when he realized what he'd done.  The dogs caught up with him barely out of sight of the building, according to RD who saw all that happen.  Sometime during the events that transpired, an officer came over and talked with RD since he was hanging out on the balcony when the first cars arrived and one of the officers noticed him.  I didn't hear that part at all.

The shot itself was frightening, when we saw the results in the morning.  I know that the room on the corner closest to us is the sleeping quarters of at least two kids (the corner of a bunk bed across the window).  The shot probably happened in the living room, went through an interior wall, all the way across the bedroom we can see, and exited the building about five feet above the window.  Remember, this is a room CHILDREN sleep in.  We haven't seen anybody in or out of that apartment since then.  RD said both the husband and wife were "taken downtown," and he's pretty sure the kids were collected by CPS.  

Most of Ranger Daddy's colleagues tease him about living in the ghetto.  But this was an utterly unexpected and unusual event for our neighborhood.  Not counting the raid (presumably for drugs) on a neighboring apartment last year, this is the first time in two years we've seen police called into our parts en masse.

[MSugarKane]

Sep. 21, 2009 at 7:50 AM

thats scary