I woke up with this vague sense of unease this morning, at about 1:30 A.M. I got up, and got some apple juice to drink. As I was standing by the kitchen sink drinking it, in the near distance I heard a siren. It was coming up to the house FAST. The distance between my house and where the police would have HAD to turn onto my street is about 4.5 blocks. Two of them are longish blocks, but still. This poor cop was "hell bent for leather", and had to be pushing 50-60 mph as he went screaming by. Full lights and siren. At 1:30 in the morning. Weird.
Weirder still? I start hearing more sirens. Then, as I stand at my little kitchen sink, one, two, three, four, five... SIX more cruisers all speed by my home! Each running full lights and siren, each pushing 50-60 mph, some so close together that if someone had made the mistake of stepping out in front of them, no one would have been able to stop in time. So, now I am getting a bit alarmed. What in the HELL is going on?!?!
I am just about to start thinking about how I can find out, and then I hear the sirens again! This time, it's the same six guys, all hauling ass down my road, but now going in the opposite direction! Now, I am more curious/freaked out than I probably have any right to be. How can I find out what is going on? Who would be up this late at night to answer a question like this?
I finally decide on calling the news desk of one of the local t.v. stations, just to say "What the hells, yo?" Okay, so I don't really talk like that, of course. But I strike out at the first place I call. KATU has no clue. So I pop up KGW on the interweb, and give them a little ringy-dingy. The girl there is much more knowledgeable and tells me there was a high-speed pursuit of a (presumably VERY) bad guy who stole a car. She tells me they had to use spike strips and the bad guy has been caught out on I-205.
Now, I-205 is close, but not terribly close to my house. So, I wonder a few things...
ONE, what was with the Keystone Cops routine? Why were they on my little road, so far away from 205, and then why did they turn around? Where were they trying to get to in such a hurry?
TWO, what could this guy have done to warrant this level of turn out? I mean, I get that stealing a car is bad and all... but when these guys run lights and siren, at the speeds they were pushing, on residential streets... they are putting a LOT of lives at risk. And not JUST their own. I don't want to make it sound like I am second guessing the cops, but this is a dangerous thing that they are doing. Cops die at these speeds all the time... just like normal people. What could this guy have done to make them risk their lives like that? It has to be more than just a stolen car. And six cars here on my little road, when the guy was just caught on 205, that means there had to be more units actually involved in the pursuit. Let's just guess 2-4 cars. That means at least 8 and maybe 10 units responding on a stolen car call? That's just a lot of man power.
THREE, I hope for their sakes he was a cop killer, or an escaped convict, or tried to assassinate the President or something really insane like that. Because the media is going to be all over them second guessing everything if he wasn't. And I hope for their sakes that he didn't make them shoot him. More second guessing, and from better minds than mine. On the other hand, I can hardly see how something like this doesn't end in somebody getting hurt. As Don Henley once sang, "Somebody going to emergency, somebody going to jail." How does that NOT happen in a case like this?
Anyway, that's all the excitement for this early A.M. I think I am going to go play "New York Minute" and think about the thin blue line that keeps us all "safe" from the people that do bad things in the night.
Love to all,
Sherry
P.S.- You have to love whatever intelligence governs the "random play" feature on iTunes. And there is NO question in my mind that there is such an intelligence. The song that popped up after "NY MInute"? "Zip Gun Bop" by the Royal Crown Revue, off the album called "Mugzy's Move". Give it a listen if you don't believe me. Too funny.
