The one time I called 911 was on a prowler who had chased my
ex-roomie into our apartment the previous day. She was so
scared she wouldn't leave the apartment til I got home from
work, so I borrowed her cell phone, figuring to troll the
neighborhood looking for this guy on my way home and call the
heat on him. No joy (as fighter jocks put it). I pulled into
our driveway upon arriving home, and as I was parking the car
he appeared from around the corner of the building. No problem;
I just called the local precinct direct (NOT the overburdened
911 system, mainly because I knew half-a-dozen officers that
worked out of that precinct) and informed them of the Creepy
Roommate Chaser in my parking lot. Deciding I'd rather wait in
my apartment only five or ten steps from the car, I loosened
the velcro on my purse's gun compartment, grabbed my
jumbo-sized canister of "dog & bear grade" OC (pepper spray)
and stepped out.
He charged me and grabbed my arm, squeezing hard enough to
leave bruises. I hosed his face with what felt like half the
can of OC, holding the nozzle of the can perhaps a foot from
his nose. He collapsed, screaming, and I bolted for the steps.
I saw that some genius had left the building's outward-opening
security door propped open with a cinderblock, and so I looked
over my shoulder to make sure he was still lying there. He
wasn't; he was right behind me. I pounded up the stairs and
into the building, tossing the OC can into the bushes on the
fly and scrabbling for my Glock 23 in my purse. Hitting my
(thank God, unlocked!) apartment door with a shoulder on the
run, I burst in and saw my roomie standing there in the bedroom
doorway; eyes bugged out and mouth agape. I kicked the door
shut behind me, trying to buy time, but my attacker was so
close behind me that it bounced off his head with a *thunk* and
flew open again. By this time I had the gun out and turned with
it in both hands, trying to raise the gun as close to my line
of sight as possible, like I'd been trained. I remember a
freaky-calm corner of my brain chanting
"frontsightfrontsightfron..." when my assailant almost ran onto
the muzzle. I remember that I was taking up slack on the
trigger, when he tried to backpedal at the sight of the gun and
fell on his butt. I tried to tell him to hold it and wait for
the police, but I couldn't get the words out. Incidentally, my
roomie says that I was screaming louder than her; not words,
just a shriek. Truthfully, I don't distinctly remember any
sounds at all, except for him hitting the floor; I thought for
an instant I'd shot him. He scrabbled backwards out the door
and jumped back out of the building. I got to the outer door in
time to see him turn the corner at the end of the driveway and
run off. It was then that I noticed that a) I was in tears, and
b) I had piddled myself.
Some twenty minutes later the police showed up; not entirely
their fault as I apparently had not made it clear that I was
out in the parking lot with this guy. They thought that I had
spotted him through a window from inside, and so they had tried
a stealthy approach to see if they could avoid spooking him.
Both officers were occasional drinking buddies of mine and were
sincerely concerned, upset, & apologetic.
They never caught the guy.
I still carry a gun...
Observations in the Aftermath:
This all happened in about maybe the space of 10 seconds; from
exiting the car to the perp fleeing. It was maybe fifteen feet
from my car to the stairs, I ran up four concrete steps, and my
apartment door was immediately inside the security door on the
right (against exterior wall). I took two or three steps into
the living room and turned with drawn gun. His proximity to me
was such that I firmly believe that if the slamming door had
not slowed him by a half step, he may have been inside the arc
of my pistol's muzzle as I turned, and things might not have
had such a favorable outcome. Certain parts of this series of
events are etched in my mind in amazing detail and drawn-out
slow motion, while others are gone. There's no audio track to
my memories of the incident after his initial scream from the
OC spray, except for the thump from the door and the thump from
his fall. I distinctly remember commencing to pull the trigger
just as his arms windmilled and he fell backwards with no more
than a foot between the pistol and his chest, and for a moment
I thought I'd shot him until he started scrambling backwards.
When he did that, I for some reason (there was no conscious
decision that I remember) removed my finger from the trigger
and tried to tell him to stop where he was. I have no doubt
that if he had stood up or moved towards me in any way, then I
would have shot him. For whatever reason, though, I couldn't do
it to a person who was scrabbling desperately backwards on his
behind and who then dove/rolled sideways out the door. To this
day I am thankful I didn't have to kill him, but I sometimes
lose sleep wondering if other, later victims may not have been
as lucky. I'm sorry for the stream of consciousness type stuff.
I'm still not real coherent on this topic, but I'd like to
point something out in closing; if guns could be magically
'disappeared' somehow, the only person in this incident that
would have been affected would have been me. My creepy attacker
apparently didn't feel he needed one; he had size and strength
on his side. That's why my very personal opinion is that gun
control sucks.
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