Scary, Scary Sh*t
Short version of this story is that between 5:30 and 6:00pm Sunday, some poor dude got beaten up and sodomized "with a plastic object" in an alley behind the main drag of Franklin Street by what he descrived as "five men ... black, about 19 or 20 years old, and all of them were wearing white T-shirts and red scarves". So far as of yet, the police don't have any suspects or motives. Poor guy crawled up to Franklin Street and called 911 at 6:00pm.Uh, I walked out of Woody's on Franklin Street about 6:10pm, less than a block away, after JennySlash called my cell because her church service let out early (yeah, she goes to Sunday evening services and I "worship" a couple of pints at the sports bar). She was looking down my way when she called and asked me what all the police cars and EMS vehicles were doing behind me - I hadn't even noticed them when I walked out to meet her.
Besides obviously feeling bad for the guy this happened to (he's still in the hospital) this whole thing feels really weird to me. It's not like Franklin Street is deserted on Sunday evenings in the summer, but it's also not so crowded that 5 young men all wearing white t's and identical do-rags wouldn't get noticed, particularly with all the press coverage of how that's supposedly a Durham gang uniform. I can see how the act itself might have gone unwitnessed given the location of the attack, but I'm having trouble with no one saying that they saw these guys either before or after. Something happened to this guy - there's no doubt about that. And it may have gone down exactly the way he said. But I gotta think that there's more to the story than we've heard so far.
Regardless, I'm gonna watch my back. I've never bought into the Chamber of Commerce/UNC smokescreen they used for years to make everyone think that crime just didn't happen in Chapel Hill. I think the townies have even stopped trying now after some of the high-profile shit that's gone down around here over the last ten years or so (and as much as we'd like to joke about all the bad stuff driving over from Durham, a lot of it has been homegrown). This is bad stuff and you'd better bet that the police department is under ALL kinds of pressure to put this one to bed in a damn hurry. In the meantime, like I said, I'm watching my back.
2 Comments:
It's always wise to watch your back and be aware of what's around you, no matter where you are. I survived working and partying late in the streets of NYC including Harlem, Pittsburg hill district, Chicago south side, DC, inner city Detroit, Atlanta. I always watched and avoided groups of young people and stayed out of their way, they get brave in numbers. When you were at UNC we spent some late nights on the streets of NY. Maybe I survived by being big and ugly but I like to think it was street smarts. Something I learned from my Pop, a guy who feared no one.
Yeah, well don't forget that we were also very drunk and very lucky.
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