Nothing in my family that I can think of, but one of my best friends was mugged maybe a year or two ago.
She’s a bartender and was walking down her block to her apartment at about 5 AM when all of a sudden, someone blitz-attacked her from behind: He didn’t say a word - just came up, punched her in the face (didn’t break anything), shoved her down, ripped her tote away, and took off. She was afraid that he was planning to rape her as well, but that didn’t happen.
A bum tried to rob me at knifepoint last year. I slugged him, he dropped, and my friends (who were far ahead of me; we were trying to make the ferry for a golfing resort but I couldn’t keep up with a twisted ankle) managed to find a rope to tie him up with until the police came. Very Batman.
I still feel horrible about it. The man was looked a frail fifty, and was very drunk. Ugh.
My great-grandfather was shot by the communists, and my paternal grandmother tortured by Japanese soldiers. I still don’t know any of these stories in full - it’s kind of a familial taboo even to mention them.
We had the run of the mill home robbery twice. We were poor so most of what they got was cheap - but it was ours dammit. The worst part about it (two things actually): while the police were standing outside our house, our upstairs neighbors were moving out. They were loading our posessions into the truck, right in front of us. However, the cops wouldn’t do anything because it would be an invasion of our neighbors’ privacy :rolleyes: . The second part is when the cops told my mother that if she didn’t like the crime, she could move out of the city. Uh, how is a single mother of 3, with a low income job and no child support supposed to afford the suburbs you ass. Don’t you think she would have if she could have?
I was once beat up (not badly) by a girl about 3 or 4 years older than me (I was probably 8 at the time) because I looked at her.
The closest I came to serious physical harm was in 7th grade. One of my foster sisters was mad at me because she felt I was stealing her family. Never mind the fact that I had a family of my own and didn’t need the foster family as a replacement. She was complaining to a classmate about me and said she was going to kill me. Little did she know, the classmate was my oldest sister who promptly contacted my social worker. I was taken out of school and that foster home within a few hours.
Other than those little incidents, I don’t think anyone in my family has been the victim of any crime other than abuse (parental and spousal).
However, almost everyone I know has been a victim or has family members who were victims.
My best friend was raped when she was 13 by her then best friends boyfriend. She became pregnant and had an abortion. Her best friend also stopped talking to her because my BF “seduced” the rapist.
My other friend’s cousin (who is also an aquaintance of mine) was shot by her father and left for dead when she was very young. Her older brother was killed and I believe her mother was also shot but I could be mistaken.
i don’t believe i know anyone who has been a victim to a serious crime, but then we’re a small place. i hope this thread is simply heavily skewed. 
I think it is a little skewed in favor of those vicimized by crime, having stories to tell, having an incentive to tell them, however, I am afraid that the skewing is not as great as one might hope.
Sorry,
Peter
Still a chance for naysayers to chime in!
By naysayers, I mean of course those who have NOT been a victim of a serious crime nor had a close friend or family member who was.
Thanks.
I suppose he shouldn’t count as family. We’re not related. But he was kind enough and nice enough to me as a child that he might as well have been.
I found out two days ago that Manny Lazar the energetic and fun owner of Wee Folks toy store at 79th East of Stony Island was murdered in his store 35 years ago which I found horribly shocking.
Rather than start a new thread, I thought it appropriate to add it to this one, mods, if you disagree, just move it please.
The Wee Folks Toy Store which died with its owner was a Chicago phenomenon, I wonder how many kids of the 60’s who were little like I was know the story of how he died? I only found out by happenstance and it knocked the wind out of me.
Hearing about his death was like hearing that someone murdered Bozo or Lassie when I was a child, but no one told me, and I wondered if in addition to the question I raised in this thread originally, if anyone had had the experience of learning about the violent death of a loved one late in life.
Also, if anyone, had thought about Wee Folks, Manny’s death, which in some ways marked the end of the old South Shore era.
I have more commentary in which I explain the store, the issues of the time, and details that I learned here:
Peter
My aunt, uncle, and cousins were held up at gunpoint in their house. Some robbers broke into their house, walked them up to my aunt and uncle’s bed, pulled the covers over their head, and took whatever they felt like. I can’t remember if it was like this before the robbery, but my aunt and uncle now have shards of glass glued all over the wall around their property. They felt lucky, though - a friend of theirs was kidnapped and held for ransom. In both crimes, they suspect that the perpetrators were policemen. (This is in Mexico, btw.)
Maybe we have a cousin in common. My cousin Eric was a very young man when he was shot to death by his best friend. They got high, got into a fight, and “best friend” decided to settle it once and for all with a gun. The killer did no time.
One of my best friends was raped by two men at a social gathering. She went over to her (former) friend Kristin’s house one evening to hang out. When she got there, she found that Kristin’s fiance was there with two of his friends. Kristin and her fiance got into a fight and went outside to talk in private. The two friends decided to have some fun with my friend while they were gone. When my friend told Kristin what happened, Kristin laughed in her face and called her a liar. It never occurred to my friend to report the crime until much, much later.
My sister’s duplex was burglarized. He stole primarily personal possessions of relatively low dollar value. The guy was almost certainly watching their home for awhile beforehand. The pothead who lived across the street saw the whole thing but didn’t call the cops because he was too concerned about getting busted for drugs. He came over the next day, though, and gave my sister the license plate number of the truck the burglar was driving–he’d thoughtfully written it down. My sister talked the pothead into meeting with the cops. She needn’t have bothered. Even though they had the guy’s license plate number, the police didn’t investigate any further. They viewed their role as “filling out a report you can give your insurance company.” Understandable, perhaps, in a big city. But in the medium-sized, relatively affluent university town where she lived, the cops spend most of their energy writing tickets for “drunk in public.” It was the actions of the cops, not the burglar, that made her feel most violated.
Somewhere out there, there is a wife, or maybe a son or daughter who’d give anything to know why he never came home from work that morning, all those years ago. I could tell them what I remembered seeing, if only through the eyes of a child, and if only I knew who they were.
I think about them all the time.
I am sadly not surprised to hear all of these stories.
No one in my immediate family has been a victim of violent crime. When I say immediate, I mean me or my parents.
I don’t know a girl who’s gone through her whole life without being felt up once or twice without permission, unfortunately that’s the kind of world we live in. I’ve had one or two experiences like that.
And our car was stolen once.
If we move on to extended family, we do have a pretty severe case.
My bio mom’s husband was shot and killed in a gas station in Mississippi. The gas station had been robbed several times before, and this time he (stupidly) tried to defend the money. The guy shot him and left him bleeding there. The worst was, while almost no one, including his abused and beaten wife, missed him, the only two people in the world who would miss him had to witness it: his two sons were in the room.
If we are talking about spousal abuse, my first cousin (in India) is a regular wife-beater. Apparently he’s toned down now, since my aunt helped her to a job and gave her some independence. :rolleyes: (for my asshole cousin)
The first birthday I ever celebrated here in Floridud, I was beaten and raped at knifepoint. Certainly it was quite traumatic at the time and when they “collared the perp”, the real fun began, what with the trial and all the crap that leads up to it. All in all, I think it took almost two years to finally put the maggot away. That was fifteen years ago, and he just got released last December.
My sister-in-laws father was murdered, though I don’t know the details.
My second cousin’s wife was a young girl when she witnessed her father murder her mother. There is even a book written about. Sadly, she’ll never be right again.
Yes, this thread selects for people who have been hit with violent crimes.
So I have been, but this is to say my mother and my father never did, my two brothers never did, the 12 aunts and uncles on my mother’s side and the six aunts and uncles on my father’s side have never had these crimes happen, or, at least, the word never came through the family if they did. And my extended family communicates pretty well. (Let’s leave this open, say a couple of incidents may have happened among those people during their lifetimes.)
So me: I was robbed at gunpoint one early evening in front of my apartment. A car of mine was stolen once. Two guys at different times exposed themselves (this was not violent). An ex-boyfriend wanted non-consensual sex and I kept calm, saying You don’t want to do that; I ended up hanging upside down as he tried to shake me out of my unzipped Levis, while I kept my knees spread so they wouldn’t slide off; he gave up after a little.
Once in a bad neighborhood a man pulled over to ask for directions, and then grabbed me by the arm and jerked me toward an alley, and I yelled YOU LET GO OF ME! in a perfectly insane voice, and my body language was ferocious: feet wide, knees bent, back hunched, hands clawed, face turned toward him and snarling. He called me a bitch and went away.
PS, as to What to Do, it has to vary with the situation. The intended victim has the best view of clues like the bad guy’s body language and so forth, and will react as they react and the results will occur as they occur.
But one ‘victim’ in San Francisco got an attacker’s license plate and called it in, and he was nailed on the Bay Bridge by the cops. So one thing you can do is take notes during or after the event and turn him in.
Just to say, I’d seen the snarling response work at least three times before in my life. Twice with a kitten and a small cat fending off large dogs (one dog each, shepherd-sized), without getting bitten and achieving a clear victory. And when I was maybe 12, my brothers had caught an opossum in a box-trap, and the grown, tough men of the harvest crew were made to jump back two or three times when the imprisoned, 8-pound-at-best critter snarled and threw itself at the wire screen.
The ‘victim’ in each case was clearly communicating, “I don’t care what happens, you’ll probably kill me but I am by gosh going to hurt you in every way I can first”, and the bad guy didn’t want to pick up the bruises. So sometimes this option is viable.
PS. I forgot the burglar in my apartment one time who said “Pardon me, I must have the wrong place” when he saw me, and went back out through the door he’d broken open (no snarling that time). A professional.
And I forgot my grandfather (great-grandfather?) had his house dynamited by the anarchist Harry Orchard, but survived.
On March 11, 1921 my great-aunt and her husband were murdered in their cabin in Wyoming. I’d always been told it was in a range war but I did some research and found out they’d just come back from visiting relatives in Kansas and, the story was, they came back with $1000 cash and were murdered for that. After shooting them both in the head the murderer burned down the cabin. All that was left of my great-aunt and her husband (besides bone) were part of a shoe heel and a corset stay.
Some years later, the guy who did it told his cellmate in a Nebraska jail/prison about it and the cellmate turned him in.
I hope my posts didn’t seem to imply that if the victim only did something right, the bad thing wouldn’t have happened.
No way.
It’s the bad guy who could have prevented it, and he’s the one who should be prevented.
As a child, I woke up in the middle of the night to find an intruder in my bedroom. He didn’t steal anything and was never caught. He did however make a return visit a few months later. My naked Dad ended up chasing him down the street.
My cousin worked in a bar and was glassed by some wanker. After the guy got out of prison my cousin bumped into him in town. The guy actually apologised. My cousin ignored him and walked straight passed him.
A different cousin had his drinked spiked with heroin. The fucker was never caught. My cousin is now fine and is expecting his first child later this year. Actually, so is the other cousin I mentioned.
My brother-in-law was robbed at gunpoint years ago. He was dropping of the night deposit for Burger King.
My husband’s car was stolen out of the driveway when he was 17.
I went to elementary school with a girl whose father shot her mother and then himself, only after getting the two kids in the room to watch. Luckily for her, she was too young to remember anything. Her brother was not so fortunate, and was the one to call 911.
As I read these posts, I realize that it was somewhat cathartic for me to get my stories out, and I hope for those others to tell their stories, if a bit frightening to read them, I have felt an obligation to do so since I started this whole thing and to reflect on them, and, since I do that kind of thing, say a prayer for you and yours.
The experience of Seestak related, for example, of being held hostage by a guy lit on angel dust fornearly two hours and firing weapons in his directions help put my own experiences in an admittedly terrifying armed office robbery in some perspective.
The thief that held up my office was relatively sane, although scared and inexperienced, which scared us, but he fired no shots, and was in and out in less than 20 minutes.
Still, this is not to say that one crime is really more potent than another. I think once you get to a certain level of terror, that’s it - you are just frightened out of your mind. As I think about this as I type, I think I am just greatful now that my experience was not worse, and that no one was killed or injured in either.
What all of the stories have in common, it seems, is the sense of violation and loss that these crimes bring. From the physical assaults to murder, they all include very personal senses of violation, of intrusion, of attack, and of loss.
I am just rambling here and am far from an expert in these matters, I have to wonder what is wrong with our country that we have so many of these crimes, as a percentage of our population compared to Canada, which has so few, and the answers that come to mind are the enormous availability of weapons here and the damage done by almost four centuries of racism (1630? - 2005 not sure when the first slaves arrived) on the continent) and economic class disparity related and not related to race that continues to widen in this country.
It makes me fear what will happen if the guarantees such as pensions and social security that workers have lived with through their entire working lives are suddenly stripped from them just as they begin to be eligible to collect them as seems possible under certain political agendas.(End of soapbox.)
I don’t want to turn this to be a political thread. But at some point I have to ask myself what are the causes of crime? How did we allow the supply of illegal drugs in this country to get out of control so that the ecstacy was available that was the root of Sleestak’s experiences?
Why don’t we have social mechanisms in place that better help those in trouble with alchohol and drugs that often trigger so many crimes? Can we protect those who seek help from being criminalized for their problems? And how can we avoid making our prisons being universities of crime?
Sorry, this is the real end of the soapbox. But I invite you all to share thoughs on this. And any others who find it to continue to share your own experiences of violent crimes and how it made you feel, etc.
Peter, The Peter Files
A Story About a 1970 Murder in South Shore of Someone I Knew, But Learned About Only Last Week
I have never been the victim of a violent crime, nor has any of my immediate family except my mother. She was at an ATM withdrawing some money and turned to walk away. Just then a man with his hand in his jacket pocket told her to re-insert her card and withdraw some more money. My mother, having just seen a news story about robberies, proceeded to give the man a lecture about how he could go to jail and ruin the rest of his life, then she just walked away.
He was arrested later, after several other holdups, with a loaded handgun in his pocket.