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Tamara
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Registered: 03-11-2000
Posts: 756
Posted: 12-02-2000 11:02 PM Profile Email All Posts by Member
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I polished this from a couple of previous posts I made here some time ago
and just stumbled across it again on my hard drive. I want to submit it
somewhere it’ll do some good. I think it’s good food for thought for any
woman living in the city, and could have some effect if placed someplace
where it wasn’t just “preaching to the choir”, so to speak.

Comments? Suggestions?

quote:
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The Day I Discovered That HCI Wants Me Dead
-by Tamara

The one time I called 911 was on a prowler who had chased my ex-roomie into
our apartment the previous day. She was so scared she wouldn’t leave the
apartment til I got home from work, so I borrowed her cell phone, figuring
to troll the neighborhood looking for this guy on my way home and call the
heat on him. No joy (as fighter pilots put it). I pulled into our driveway
upon arriving home, and as I was parking the car he appeared from around the
corner of the building. No problem; I just called the local precinct direct
(NOT the overburdened 911 system, mainly because I knew half-a-dozen
officers that worked out of that precinct) and informed them of the Creepy
Roommate Chaser in my parking lot. Deciding I’d rather wait in my apartment
only five or ten steps from the car, I loosened the velcro on my purse’s gun
compartment, grabbed my jumbo-sized canister of ?dog & bear grade? OC
(pepper spray) and stepped out.
He charged me and grabbed my arm, squeezing hard enough to leave bruises. I
hosed his face with what felt like half the can of OC, holding the nozzle of
the can perhaps a foot from his nose. He collapsed, screaming, and I bolted
for the steps. I saw that some genius had left the building’s
outward-opening security door propped open with a cinderblock, and so I
looked over my shoulder to make sure he was still lying there. He wasn’t; he
was right behind me. I pounded up the stairs and into the building, tossing
the OC can into the bushes on the fly and scrabbling for my Glock 23 in my
purse. Hitting my (thank God, unlocked!) apartment door with a shoulder on
the run, I burst in and saw my roomie standing there in the bedroom doorway;
eyes bugged out and mouth agape. I kicked the door shut behind me, trying to
buy time, but my attacker was so close behind me that it bounced off his
head with a thunk and flew open again. By this time I had the gun out and
turned with it in both hands, trying to raise the gun as close to my line of
sight as possible, like I?d been trained. I remember a freaky-calm corner of
my brain chanting ?frontsightfrontsightfron?? when my assailant almost ran
onto the muzzle. I remember that I was taking up slack on the trigger, when
he tried to backpedal at the sight of the gun and fell on his butt. I tried
to tell him to hold it and wait for the police, but I couldn’t get the words
out. Incidentally, my roomie says that I was screaming louder than her; not
words, just a shriek. Truthfully, I don’t distinctly remember any sounds at
all, except for him hitting the floor; I thought for an instant I’d shot
him. He scrabbled backwards out the door and jumped back out of the
building. I got to the outer door in time to see him turn the corner at the
end of the driveway and run off. It was then that I noticed that a) I was in
tears, and b) I had piddled myself.
Some twenty minutes later the police showed up; not entirely their fault as
I apparently had not made it clear that I was out in the parking lot with
this guy. They thought that I had spotted him through a window from inside,
and so they had tried a stealthy approach to see if they could avoid
spooking him. Both officers were occasional drinking buddies of mine and
were sincerely concerned, upset, & apologetic.
They never caught the guy.
I still carry a gun…

Observations in the Aftermath:
This all happened in about maybe the space of 10 seconds; from exiting the
car to the perp fleeing. It was maybe fifteen feet from my car to the
stairs, I ran up four concrete steps, and my apartment door was immediately
inside the security door on the right (against exterior wall). I took two or
three steps into the living room and turned with drawn gun. His proximity to
me was such that I firmly believe that if the slamming door had not slowed
him by a half step, he may have been inside the arc of my pistol?s muzzle as
I turned, and things might not have had such a favorable outcome. Certain
parts of this series of events are etched in my mind in amazing detail and
drawn-out slow motion, while others are gone. There?s no audio track to my
memories of the incident after his initial scream from the OC spray, except
for the thump from the door and the thump from his fall. I distinctly
remember commencing to pull the trigger just as his arms windmilled and he
fell backwards with no more than a foot between the pistol and his chest,
and for a moment I thought I’d shot him until he started scrambling
backwards. When he did that, I for some reason (there was no conscious
decision that I remember) removed my finger from the trigger and tried to
tell him to stop where he was. I have no doubt that if he had stood up or
moved towards me in any way, then I would have shot him. For whatever
reason, though, I couldn’t do it to a person who was scrabbling desperately
backwards on his behind and who then dove/rolled sideways out the door. To
this day I am thankful I didn’t have to kill him, but I sometimes lose sleep
wondering if other, later victims may not have been as lucky.
I’m sorry for the stream of consciousness type stuff. I’m still not real
coherent on this topic.
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So you see, if guns could be magically ‘disappeared’ somehow, the only
person in this instance that would have been affected would have been me. My
creepy attacker apparently didn’t feel he needed one; he had size and
strength on his side. That’s why my very personal opinion is that gun
control sucks.

__________________
“..but never ever Fear. Fear is for the enemy. Fear and Bullets.”
10mm: It’s not the size of the Dawg in the fight, it’s the size of the fight
in the dog!