My grandmother's favorite movie series is Death Wish. In these movies, Charles Bronson plays a vigilante out to avenge the death of his family or girlfriends, or to rid the neighborhood of thugs. My grandmother appreciates the "justice" achieved when Bronson takes out the bad guys. She wishes that there were more vigilantes in the world today; it would be a safer place.
In the first Death Wish movie, the murderers follow Bronson's wife and daughter back to their apartment on New York City's Upper West Side and murder the wife and rape the daughter. Bronson's apartment is in 33 Riverside Drive, on the corner of West 75th Street, across from Riverside Park. When we first watched the attackers go into the building I thought it looked familiar. As the plot unfolded and we saw more shots of the block, I realized that I had been in that building - many times before. My Bible Study met there for several years and I went there every Friday night. When I told my Grandmother that I lived about half a block from that building and that I had been there many times she told me that she was so relieved that I was no longer in New York. Obviously I was living in a very unsafe place since Bronson's family was attacked a short distance from my house. I assured her that New York was very different now as opposed to 35 years ago when the first Death Wish movie came out. I had never been shot or seen a shooting in New York.
A few days after we watched a Death Wish marathon, my grandmother and I were sitting in her den in the small town of Ardmore, Oklahoma. It was evening and I heard voices in the front yard and looked out the windows. My grandmother lives on a corner lot and can get a large volume of foot traffic. I initially thought maybe children were playing in the yard, but I couldn't see anyone. I listened more closely and determined the voices were fighting men's. After some time the voices disappeared. My sister called and my grandmother and I got into a conversation with her.
Two loud bangs interrupted our conversation. I got up to look out the windows again. We both realized that the bangs were gunshots. I told my grandmother I was calling the police, but as I prepared to do so, we heard the first responders arrive. Out the window I saw two ambulances, two fire trucks, and about five squad cars descend upon our corner, lights whirling. I described the activities to my grandmother, who remained in her armchair, and to my sister, who was still on the phone. I watched neighbors walk from all directions toward the intersection. As is often the case at of accident sites or crime scenes, there is often a lot of activity, but little substance. The lights on the vehicles continued to turn, the neighbors moved back and forth to try to get more information, but at the actual site nothing much was happening, at least from our vantage point. From time to time a vehicle would leave. The fire trucks were gone. One of the ambulances left. Some of the squad cars departed. In the remaining ambulance I saw them load up something and peel away. But I could not see inside. A few police cars remained until late in the night.
Information was slow to be released. We learned from a neighbor that the shooting took place a few houses down. Though we don't know those neighbors, we believe that the women there were prostitutes and/or drug dealers. Apparently, two men came to the house and had a dispute with each other. That dispute carried over into our yard. One left (we had heard the quiet after the argument ceased). He then came back with a friend, and a gun. They shot the other man and then fled. The police got descriptions of both men, as well as their names and photos.
One of the assailants looked, according to my grandmother, like "a fine young man with his whole life in front of him." He was 19 years old, clean cut, white, and wholesomely attractive. She was disappointed that instead of getting a job and making something of himself, he was going and doing something like this. As far as we know, he has been on the run since the shooting occured in January. According to another source in town, he came from Texas. The local socio-political theory goes as follows: all problems in Oklahoma come from Texas. (As my grandmother's town is near the Texas border it often encounters these problems first.) In turn, all problems in Texas first come from Mexico. The exception is drugs. It is not fair to blame the influx of drugs from Mexico on the Mexicans because if there were no demand in the US, the Mexicans would not traffic the drugs.
The other assailant was a black man in his early 20s. We don't know if it was him or his friend the "fine young man" who was arguing in our yard. He fled the scene and the cops could not find him right away. However, a few days after the shooting, this assailant went to the Carter County courthouse for a hearing in an unrelated case. The court officials recognized him and thought that maybe he was the guy they were looking for - the one who fled the scene. He acknowledged that he was the suspect and they placed him under arrest. I guess he showed up to court with the optimistic hope that no one would recognize him. As it happened, no one in the court had made the connection beforehand; they were not waiting to bring him into custody. It seems almost by chance that the court officer recognized him, or otherwise he would have eluded detection. In a town of 25,000 people, it seems the police should be able to recognize people with prior arrests, and check to see if there are any current cases pending against them.
The victim of the shooting went to the hospital and the reports in the following days revealed that he was in stable condition. No other information was released - we don't know if he was a "fine young man," or his age, or why he was at the home of the suspected prostitutes. We also don't know if or when the hospital released him, but we never saw a death announcement in the news - we take that as a good sign.
The suspected prostitutes have moved out of the house. The owners have started renovations after they inspected the house and discovered that the toilet had fallen through the floor and the roof was not intact.
After all of this I pointed out to my grandmother that the only time in my life I had experienced a shooting outside my home was in Oklahoma - never in New York or anywhere else. So maybe Bronson's character had the misfortune 35 years ago to lose his family to violence in Manhattan. But my violent spot was Oklahoma. I do not plan on becoming a vigilante, though.
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