“All I want to do is speed, speed.”~ Miki Gorman 
This evening, the rest of the hustle and bustle of people coming home in rush hour traffic provided nearly an hour and a half of unusual entertainment.
This all came about because apparently over the weekend, I had missed a lot of criminal activity going on across the street and in the alley across the road.
Now I live in a gated community and that is security for the people that live here…. if you want to call it that.
But in this alley has been reports by my neighbors of prostitutes having sex, drug deals happening, and plenty of intoxicated people trying to stay off the streets and not get caught in public.
I told the neighbor that when these things were going on, to call me. I wanted to see this for myself. Honestly, sometimes its hard to believe. It seems as if the police are constantly being called by someone, my neighbors in particular, for all kinds of things that happen during the night and especially during the weekend.
I figured that if I saw it for myself, then I could be someone else that would be constantly calling for help to make the presence of police grow in order to keep ourselves safe from these people who are doing drugs, having sex, and other activities and causing concern for the neighbors and their safety.
After doing some research, it was shown that my neighborhood alone had over 143 crimes committed. From property damage, break ins, assaults, and everything in between. All of that happening in ONE month. And a large part of those crimes happening directly across the street.
I’ve not been involved in any of these assaults, or been a victim of one in a long time. Thankfully. And I hope to never be in one ever again.
So then around 6:00 PM, I received a telephone call from one of the neighbors. They were telling me about how they had purchased this movie on DVD called “Nuns & Guns”. From the verbal description I was getting, it sounded like a T&A flick. But then the neighbor abruptly hung up on me because they had seen the police trying to stop a city bus and get it turned around.
Then another neighbor called and said something was going on and that the police were everywhere. So I went down to the other side of the property and I was being told that a vehicle had hit a woman and her two small children. The police was busy diverting traffic through a grocery store parking lot to get to around the intersection in which this unfortunate accident had happened.
It was apparently bad enough that they had a policeman in the middle of the street, trying to get cars away from the scene. Myself and the neighbors would find it amusing that some of these drivers were trying to take things into their own hands and get around a parked city bus on their own terms, while ignoring the direction of the police. These people were stopped and given citations. And multiple ones at that!!
After a while, we would yell at people walking along the sidewalk to see if they knew anything from our side of the gate. We had been told that there was a mother that was hit by a vehicle and she had two small children with her. We also had been told that there was fatalities, saying that the mother and her two children were killed.
We all stood there, hoping and praying for the best. We couldn’t see the crime scene from being on property. But none of us was stupid enough to interfere with a crime scene… just to see what had happened.
We continued to watch and shake our heads at people getting pulled over and getting citations for their being impatient, as well as their stupidity.
Meanwhile, I sat there in silence thinking about my own experiences with traffic accidents that I was personally involved with.
In the 90’s, I was sitting in the passenger seat and this guy was noticing that he was going too fast, so he hit the brake hard enough that his vehicle thought that it was coming to a stop and the passenger side airbag decided that it wanted to make out with me. So I got punched in the face by it.
Then around December of 2007, I was again in the passenger seat of my (then) girlfriend’s car at a red light. We were having a fight about whether or not to see a display of Christmas lights on display in a local park. A inebriated man in a truck came up from behind and hit us. It did several thousands of dollars of damage to her car that was only two years old. We sat there and waited for the police and we did go to the hospital to check to make sure that we were okay. Both of us ended up on a butt load of pain killers and she missed a day of work. And needless to say, when Christmas rolled around we were still kind of banged up.
But this traffic accident that happened earlier today mostly reminded me of when I was a child and I was walking home in my neighborhood to make sure that I was in the front yard before the street lights came on. I was tired and sat down on the curb only four houses away from home and this driver came barreling around the corner and narrowly missed me and a mailbox. It was the first time that I would EVER give a report to the police because “I almost got hit by a car”. 
I remember getting up and started to cry. By the time I got home. The entire neighborhood, complete with kids and their parents were all in my family’s driveway, and a policeman was surrounded by everyone. They had heard about this kid that almost got ran over, and I announced that it was me.
So then the policeman asked me questions like what color was the car? Could I remember the license plate? What did the driver look like? And so on.
It was very scary for me to have gone through that because I started to freak out about the fact that I was going to have to go to court and “tell on this guy” in court, and I would miss school and everything.
My father instead, went to court. And to this day I don’t understand how or why that happened instead of me going.
But then again, I was only six years old when this had happened.
I watched the late night news tonight. As predicted, they had covered the accident. I was relieved to hear the reports that the mother and two children were sent to the hospital, and they did NOT have serious injuries. So the information that we received about them being killed was incorrect. I was happy to hear it, and hope that the mother and her two children will recover from this real soon.
But it does raise questions with my other neighbors about just how this had happened. A LOT of people around here jaywalk. They ignore crosswalk signals and what not. But one commented that the crosswalk, even if someone hit the button to activate it, the signal doesn’t last very long at all.
So the mother either was jaywalking with her children, or just didn’t have enough time to get to the other side of the street before this happened. Of course, we who live here will never really know the truth. None of us was an eyewitness to the actual accident when it happened. We just noticed the flurry of police officers and police vehicles in the area. Meanwhile, trying to get three city buses turned around and still direct traffic and divert them to go another route and away from the crime scene itself. And of course, a lot of people got in trouble for doing their own thing.
That was the excitement of the day. I guess “Nuns & Guns” will have to wait for another day.
Dambreaker 