and I woulda done the same thing that these people did.
Honestly, I’m not too proud when I think back on this, but there’s been at least twice where I’ve spotted someone laying down on a sidewalk, and I just walked away. I just figured the guys were drunk. The last time I can remember thinking to myself as I got into my car, “Oh well, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…”
It just never occurred to me to call 911.
I guess I’m an evil person. Or I grew up around too many drunks.
He may have gotten involved in an altercation that was not as serious as it appeared.
I have some understanding of how people could walk by and assume that he was drunk. But what about the woman who he thought he was helping? She saw him get stabbed, knew that he was just trying to do her a favor, and sacrificed him.
It’s possible that she was the one who reported an injured person but gave the wrong address. However, she was an ungrateful SOB to not stay with him until she could find someone to help.
Huh, just the other day I was at a train station on a Sunday morning, and there was a guy apparently sunbathing/sleeping on the floor at the end of the platform. He obviously wasn’t homeless, but it is I suppose possible that he was drunk from the night before and sleeping it off. Lots of people were around and he did not look to be in distress so I didn’t feel the need to disturb him, but I suppose if everyone else took that attitude there could be a problem. If I had had time, I guess I should have reported it to the station staff and let them deal with it.
On the other hand, a few months ago I was driving home from a nightclub (as the designated, i.e. non-drinking driver), and came across a young man apparently asleep on the pavement. This was 3am or so in a quiet village so there was absolutely no-one else around, nor was there likely to be for at least another 3 or 4 hours. It was not that cold, but he only had a thin jacket on. I stopped the car and got out, and he appeared to be breathing (and drooling - thankfully no vomit though), but fast asleep.
I decided the only decent thing to do was to shake him awake and see what he was doing. He woke fairly easily but it took him a while to work out where he was and what he was doing there. Luckily, he lived only a 10 minute drive away (but it would have taken at least an hour to walk even if he had been in a fit state to do so), and was coherent enough to give me directions, so I took him home. He first insisted on searching the immediate area for his keys and wallet, both of which he appeared to have lost. I suppose it is possible he had been mugged (or even robbed whilst asleep), but he showed no signs of physical violence and his condition suggested he could easily have mislaid the items.
When we reached his home, I waited to ensure he was able to get in, and was treated to the sight and sound of his mother, in a nightdress, going nuts at him for a) getting in so late, b) losing his stuff, and c) waking them up. They did have the decency to be very grateful, though.
I wouldn’t have walked away most likely. Ten years ago I had a similar thing happen. In Lloret Demar (sp?) Spain, beach resort town near Barcelona. Its a party place (I sear there were more brits there than spaniards and they par-tayyed) I was bar hopping solo and I saw a guy face down on the sidewalk, people just walking by. His nose was bleeding and he looked awful and smelled worse. Still, I asked him “Hey, buddy…you okay? Do you speak english?”. He didn’t but he gestured for me to help him up and I did. Then he grunted and gestured for me to help him walk to a somewhat nearby bar. It was a hole in the wall bar, and when I asked no one in there said they knew him or anything. He then gestured grunted/signalled for me to help him walk to another nearby eatery. Man, this guy smelled like a brewery, he was so drunk. But I kept thinking maybe he’s looking for his friends or something. After all it looks like someone beat the snot out of him.
I left him outside when I went into the eatery to ask if anyone knew him. Meanwhile he began vomitting in full view of the people inside eating. The waiter called the “The Town Drunk” and they’d take him somewhere to dry out. At least the policeman told me I was being a good samaritan for not just stepping over a bleeding man on the street. However he explained he was bleeding because he fell flat on his face from being so smashed.
Oh well, I don’t feel like I wasted my time. If I were lying on the sidewalk bleeding I’d like to think someone would at least TRY to help me.
Maybe a year and a half ago, I was walking around and found a dude sort of collapsed on a lawn. It was about 10 and I guessed he was still suffering from the previous night. (I live in a college town…enough said.) He appeared to be conscious, so I asked him if he was okay, needed any help. He told me no. I made sure of it, then walked off.
I don’t know if I’m actually a particularly good person, though. I’m mostly just a busybody.
I saw a story on this on CNN and the way they were grandstanding about this was such bullshit. They had some kind of “expert” on who said that the reason no one stopped is that because kids watch too many violent movies and play videos games. Seriously, that was what he said. Which is such bullshit because never once did they focus on the fact that the guy was homeless, laying on the side of the street. If the guy did not look like a typical homeless street person sleeping on the ground, I don’t believe people would have walked by. Yeah, it’s a shame what happened, and the woman he saved is a bitch because clearly she knew what really happened, but you can’t blame people for walking past one homeless person on the ground when they see many other homeless people laying on the ground all the time.
How about the person who lifted him up, saw that he was bleeding and still left him there to die? Can we blame them? I think we can put a little blame on them.
Sounds like another case of the bystander effect. There was a psych experiment I read about some time ago, an extension of testing the bystander effect. They got a few different people to act as if they’ve passed out in the middle of a busy street to test how many people would stop and help. The guy who keeled over while in a business suit got attention a lot faster than a guy who was dressed as if he were homeless. If you look like you shouldn’t be passed out on the middle of the sidewalk, help comes a lot quicker because it’s less “normal” than seeing a scraggly guy sleeping in a doorway.
One time I was driving down a busy multi-lane street at rush hour. I saw a woman laid out on the median on the concrete. She looked like she was asleep, but it was summer in Houston, and she could have found a better place to lie down, like in the grass, or under a tree. I called 911 and continued on home. I wonder what happened to her.
Another time, we were in Daytona Beach. I saw a guy asleep on the porch of a motel unit, near ours. I actually went over to him and made sure he was breathing. When we came back, he was still there, but in a different position.
The next morning we saw him at the pool - and we teased him unmercifully for not being able to “hang.” 
His buddies finally showed up and put him to bed. He didn’t remember any of it.
I think in the situation of the OP, I would have called 911, and kept on walking.
I would (and have) called 911 to report someone laying on the sidewalk/street. I figure even if they’re just passed out drunk, they are a prime candidate to become a victim of theft or possibly even assault if they’re just left there to sleep it off.
I’ve never personally checked on someone in that situation because it’s generally in the bad part of town and I don’t feel any particular need to put myself in harms way when the police are a phone call away.
I’ve called 911 for down people on several occasions.
Is it really such a chunk out of one’s day to dial 3 numbers and stand there for a few minutes? You don’t have to do anything, EMS will do what they can, you don’t have to even check if they’re breathing if you don’t want to.
I will say, that even hospital personnel can misread a frequent flyer. I once started a shift in an ER where it was my assignment to wake the drunks, sleeping in a side hallway.
The routine was, they were brought in by the police, had blood drawn for alcohol levels, handcuffed to a gurney, in a safe position and left over night to sleep it off. Then in the morning we woke them, made them brush their teeth, gave them breakfast. Then about 8:00am the police van came to take them to detox.
One guy didn’t wake up. I went to his chart to find out his etoh level. It was 0. He’d been in the day before for a head lac after a fight. The police had found him unconscience under a bridge.
He died later that day from a bleed in his brain. It wouldn’t have happened if the nurse assigned to the drunk hall had done her job and checked everyone BA when they came back from the lab, but she assumed that since he was a FF there was no reason to check.
I hate to say it, but in New York you wouldn’t make that call for someone passed out drunk. If you called the police for every person passed out drunk or every homeless guy who looks like he could be passed out drunk you would eventually be arrested for harrassing the police. I pass by homeless people sleeping in doorways and stuff at least twice a week and I see homeless people up and about in the city every single day. I can’t take police away from being available for robberies and the like because I see homeless people asleep some place. This man didn’t deserve to die and every person that knew he was injured and did nothing are guilty of being assholes but to a random passerby he wouldn’t warrant a second glance.
For all those who say they would immediately call 911, I would be really interested in knowing where you live. If you live in the suburbs or some place where seeing a person laying on the sidewalk is something out of the ordinary and *not *an everyday occurrence, well then your response would make sense. If you live in NYC, you would not be calling 911 every time you see someone homeless laying on the ground.
Exactly. Plus this happened early morning when it was still dark out. (Which make me question the assumption that someone could see he was bloody. But if they did, then that *one *person is a douche, not the regular people just walking by.) I hardly think every one of those passersby studied the man in detail and then walked on. They saw (what they thought was) a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk under a scaffolding, and immediately dismissed it as routine.
Hell, when I was in San Francisco last year, had I called 911 for every person sleeping on the ground outside my hotel, I’d still be on the phone.
Talking about the random person passing by is pointless. You can debate that all day without arriving at a definitive answer. You can even debate the position of the man who lifted him and saw blood.
All of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the woman who this person chivalrously aided, only to be left by the side of the road because it wasn’t her problem. She deserves a more severe sentence than the person who stabbed him.
I found a man lying next to the sidewalk once. I asked if he was OK and he mumbled something incoherent. I figured he was drunk or on drugs, but for all I knew he could’ve been injured or suffering a medical condition so I called 911 anyway. I can’t imagine even slightly risking letting someone die who could’ve been saved because I made the wrong assumption or couldn’t be bothered with a simple task.
It may be pointless, but I do think it’s somewhat related. Human beings seem to have a natural instinct to want to help out others of their kind. But, when you see a certain situation often, you get accustomed to it. I think that you ultimately become calloused. And some take it too far.
Humans are really good at going from one extreme to the other. It’s actually easier to go from caring about everyone to not caring about anyone, than it is to care in one situation and not in another.
This is actually an observable phenomenon in the bystander effect: diffusion of responsibilty. If your car breaks down, you could actually be more likely to get help on a less traveled country road than a busy highway. If a single motorist sees another motorist who needs help and noone else is around, they’re likely to feel a responsibility to help. When greater numbers of motorists are around, that responsibility to help is diffused - everybody assumes that somebody else must be helping, and consequently nobody does. So motorists go unhelped on busy highways, and injured people go without medical attention in the middle of crowds.
Why does that article refer to him as a “Good Samaritan”? Isn’t the Good Samaritan the one who stops and picks up the bloody guy in the ditch, rather than the one in the ditch?
He was stabbed because he intervened in somebody else’s fight, apparently to save a woman who then may or may not have tried to summon police to where he was–but did not return to or stay with him.
pravnik, I was going to post what you did. The interesting thing that I saw in one experiment was that as soon as one person came forward and started helping, other people started stopping as well.
It is, I think, a consequence of living in a society so large, you can’t possibly know everyone else. Even if he was homeless, if you knew his name was Hugo, and that he had family in Guatamala, and maybe that his favorite soda was Dr. Pepper, if you’d exchanged a few words with him once or twice, you’d be so much more likely to stop and check on him.
The OP didn’t do anything the rest of us haven’t. I walked past a man I took to be a homeless drunkard a few days ago. He was curled around an empty bottle of vodka, and a conscious woman sat across the sidewalk from him, so I figured he must be okay. I could, very easily have been wrong.