My father had a common nightmare happen to him. He stopped at a convenience store in Shreveport, LA when he was 18. He got back in the car and a true psycho with a knife rose out of the back seat and told him to just start driving and if he didn’t do exactly as he was told, he would die. In fact, the kidnapper planned for my father to die that night anyway and the motives were bizarre. The kidnapper was convinced my father was sleeping with his fiance even though they didn’t know each other and he wanted them to die painfully together. The rest of the night was spent driving around trying to arrange this murder liaison. About 6 o’clock in the morning, the kidnapper made my father stop at a phone booth and try to reach his fiance again. This was in the 1960’s were things were more hefty than they are now. As the phone rang and reached no one, my father established a fake conversation with her and got the interest of the kidnapper. When he put his guard down, my father hit him in the face with the phone. When he bent down, he started kicking him until he was incapacitated enough to run.
He ran down the street looking for anyone to help that early when a police cruiser pulled up beside him and picked him up. Someone had seen him get kidnapped and the police had been searching the whole city all night long. The kidnapper had done a bunch of crazy stuff before but supposedly got sent away for a true life sentence for this whole scheme.
I could actually make this a very long post. At least 5 other family members have had life threatening crimes committed against them yet none have succeeded. We are just a middle class bunch that always lives in decent areas but it can happen anywhere. Six assailants went to prison and one died in a police shootout after he held my grandfather and step-grandmother hostage, robbed them, and left them bound and gagged.
The one against me was two knife wielding muggers that grabbed me from behind in front of my Boston apartment building in a place that happened to be deserted in late 1999. I fought back by instinct and won. They went around the area pulling the same thing for an hour before the gang-squad police caught them. I was the star witness and the trial negotiations went on for 2 years. One of the guys got 3 years for pleading guilty and the other got 5. They had both only been out of prison for two months and the police said that they wanted them right back in for everyone’s sake for as long as possible and that they were fully capable of killing me or anyone else.
