I shall wax philosophical on a couple matters this evening. First in the news was an incident at Hillcrest Apartments. A man installing underground cable for security cameras was hit in the back and neck by projectiles from a pellet gun. The news hit the media last night, but stories were not corroborating with what my informant was saying.
I called a tenant last night to find out why her little girl did not show up for her piano lesson. The mother said the place had been in lockdown, three fire trucks and untold numbers of cop cars were on the scene. She suspected there had been a homicide. The first emergency vehicles had arrived about seven hours earlier, and another arrived as we spoke.
The mother is looking forward to moving out as soon as she can. Her son was one of the kids that was attacked last week coming home from movie night at the community center. She took him home early from church because his head hurt so badly.
At the other end of the street lives a little old lady. Some of her friends were trying to find another place for her to live because of all the gunfire on the weekends.
Looking at the story from another angle, the incident Wednesday was very familiar. Several years ago, I covered Asheville City Council for a local paper and did investigative reporting rather than the he-said, she-said I do now. Members of council claimed the owners of McCormick Heights were slumlords. McCormick Heights was a project part-owned by a private corporation.
The city code officers informed me that every time they sent a guy over there, he generated an arm’s length list of violations. Every time he went back to check compliance, everything on the list would be fixed, and another list of new busted items would be generated.
I had to check out the scene for myself. Just within the property, my car was surrounded by about ten dealers wearing fancy winter coats and fancy sports shoes. They ranged in age from their early twenties down to maybe five years old. As the big guys chased the car, the little ones followed their role models. One, upon seeing my face, said, “Eeuw!” The little guys repeated, “Eeuw!” Others with more customer service experience said, “I’ll get you what you want.” “I’ll get you what you want,” repeated the little ones.
My driver’s side window was down. One drew a gun which looked exactly like the ones used by Asheville police officers. (I got to use one at the Citizens’ Police Academy.) Something in my mind screamed, “Plastic!” and so I didn’t panic. Otherwise, somebody would have gotten run over. The owner of the gun then shot a plastic projectile into the car. It hit my neck, and I could still feel the sting the next day.
Why do I mention these stories? To start, I might ask, “Why do I blog?” One answer might be because I can’t stand man’s inhumanity to man, and I think too much power in one place is dangerous. It is thoughts of innocents stuck in situations like this that cause me to get mad when government concerns itself with the spacing between trees and which construction materials make for the best pedestrian interaction of new development. I recall a discussion city council had some years back about whether or not aluminum siding should be criminalized in certain districts.
