That could have been me.

[elfs]

I saw a murdered man in my neighboorhood this morning.

As I drove out to get on the highway this morning, I was stopped at the exit from my neighboorhood by a sherrif's car blocking the road with a sign reading "Road Closed: Accident Investigation". The sign is generic, for this was no accident. The sherrif's relations officer is now reporting that around 5:45 this morning a man flagged down a car coming up the same street I had just tried to enter, shot the driver in the head, pulled the body from the car and drove away.

The dead man was 62 years old. As I pulled into the bus alcove the deputy had thoughtfully parked before to get the room needed for a U-turn, I saw the body. It was lying on the street, wrapped in a construction-site orange tarpaulin, and just as I finished the turn the wind whipped it and exposed the dead man's feet.

I found my way out of the neighborhood by another street, but I'm a little bit freaked by this incident. Omaha and I chose this neighborhood precisely because it's never been a region with any crime. The local newpaper's police blotter is a joke; Omaha and I read it weekly to see what's going on, and other than petty theft, the ocassional pot bust, and prostitution reports from the region by the airport hotels the next "city" over, there's rarely anything of interest. Our own subdivision and surroundings is as quiet and law-abiding as they come. Someone tried to open an adult video store-- the only one in city limits-- and it closed down due to lack of patronage.

I don't know what to make of this right now. I live in a neighboorhood of strawberry festivals, creek restoration projects, pumpkin patches, and Girl Scouts. I'm hoping this is just some bizarre incident, some never-to-be-repeated-anytime-soon thing. Omaha and I moved away from White Center precisely because it was a scary neighboorhood, with gang activity, four adult bookstores of the "You're a creep so the store is creepy" variety, and at least twice in the years we lived there drive-by shootings.

I'll keep an eye on it, but... bleah.

[Edit] The Seattle Times has more. Some of it seems a little off. How do they know it was a carjacking if nobody saw the man get into the car? The photo's a bit off-putting to me because that's the angle at which I saw it. In bright sunlight I guess the body tarp is yellow, not orange. And "shot more than once" doesn't sound like a random carjacking, but a deliberate targetting.

Comments

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

(most violent crimes are committed by someone the victim knows and all that)

Which is the deadly flaw in the "a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill an acquaintance or family member than a burglar" statistic that the gun-control lobby likes to wave in people's faces, because it tabulated gunshot deaths in the home occurring in King County, Washington, from 1978 to 1983 -- 12 unintentional deaths, 41 cases of criminal homicide, 333 suicides, 3 unknown, and 9 cases of self-protection homicide. Take away the suicides (how do you commit suicide and have it _not_ be an 'acquaintance or family member', regardless of method?), and the 'statistic' skews radically. Additionally, the authors themselves stated

"Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified."

Amusingly, if you look at the violent deaths in the home not involving a firearm for King County for the same period, you find 50 criminal homicides, 347 suicides, and 4 self-protection homicides, which gives a 'statistic' that you are 99 times more likely to be killed by an acquaintance or family member than you are to kill a burglar if you don't use a gun. Bogus statistics are such fun to play with.

[shadowfey.livejournal.com]

Erm, I really wasn't referring to guns at all; just stating that Elf shouldn't feel too freaked just because an incident occurred, and that it seems to me that he and his family did plenty of research in trying to pick as safe a place as possible to live. Sorry if you took it otherwise.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I know it wasn't about guns; I was curious, so I tried looking up statistics about violent crime, and it seems that there's nothing readily searchable about the relative incidence of acquaintance/random violent crime outside the home, and the pages with statistics about violent crime in the home revolve heavily around the gun-control issue. It is reassuring to see, though, that the vast majority of violent deaths are suicides; it preserves my belief in the fundamental slantedness of statistics when used to support a position.