28rob.html

Didja hear about the crazy shootout in Midtown? Guy robs jewelry store, cops show up, guy holds gun to owner's head, then darts out and has a shootout with the cops?

Didja hear about the shootout in Harlem?

I was on edge after the murder in my neighborhood Saturday night, but was beginning to forget about it by last night. Came home a little late from a lecture on campus Tuesday night and didn't mind the idea of walking up Fifth Avenue from 110th to 116th, which can be a little sketchy. In fact, the walk was longer this time--the bus driver said "Last Stop" at Adam Clayton Powell, so I had an extra two blocks to walk on 110th.

But I always feel safer once I get to the firehouse. It's halfway up Fifth Avenue. It's lighted well, and there are big, mean, tough firefighters in there to defend me (and if they can't, at least there's an ambulance there).

So I passed the firehouse, sighed and looked at the moon, turned the corner, let myself into my building, harrumphed up three flights of stairs, and went to bed. But then I thought about school, and I couldn't sleep.

The lecture I had attended was about how to get started on our Master's projects. Bruce Porter, author of Blow, talked about how to write a gripping, compelling, engrossing, enchanting, en-everything-ing story. He showed us two great long-form articles. He said--I'll paraphrase--I spent my fall semester at Columbia back in 1724 sleeping on the street with Bowery derelicts, that's how I got my Master's story. He talked about how a former student knocked on a sex offender's front door and, though sheer honesty, curiosity, empathy--humanity, brothers and sisters, humanity--got said rapist to share his innermost secrets with the world (or at least the readers of New York).

I had been thinking of writing something called "Something Something Something: How Something is Related to Something, but Not How You've Always Thought About It, You Know What I Mean, Hoss?"

So I woke up and thought about stories I could do. I have "topics," okay, but what's the story? And my topics aren't that great. Maybe it's because I'm not reporting enough. I should be out on the street more, seeing things I never dreamed I'd see.
BANG! BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG ! (THERE WERE ECHOES AFTER EACH BANG BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TRANSCRIBE THEM.)

Silence, for somewhere between 5 seconds and 5 minutes.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

I am not exaggerating the number of bangs, for I will present evidence of at least 28 shell casings if you stick with me here.

I didn't know if it was a gun. I thought guns wen't POP, not BANG.

I walked downstairs, (allow me to dramatize this) intrepidly. (Not just an adverb, but an adverb preceded by an unnecessary comma, for emphasis.)

I stuck my head out the front door of my building, saw a sketchy guy (well, anyone would have looked sketchy at that point), and darted back upstairs, cowardly.

I went out on my fire escape to look for cop cars or ambulances. A woman next door had stuck her head out the window.

"Was that a gun?" I asked her.

She said--I'll paraphrase--HAHAHAHAHAHA you white bread so-and-so, what farm did you grow up on?

I grabbed my pen and pad, and walked downstairs. I walked down 116th toward Madison. I turned right on Madison.

Holy Jeezisballs, look at all these people! I could see, a block away, that telltale bouquet of people standing on a corner, craning their necks, slits of red and blue light sneaking out from between them. The cornrows, the baggy pants, the sotto voce "muhfuckin poh-leese."

I hope you don't think I'm being glib, or stereotyping. I mention these things because this kind of thing happens to these people all the freaking time. That's who was standing there.

Look at the URL for the Times article I linked above. The end of the URL is 28rob.html. It looks like a prisoner's number. And that was Midtown. We'll see what goes in the paper about this.

There were cops, cop cars, cop everything all over the place. The whole block was roped off. I walked up to a cop, and he said, "Let us take care of business. Go over and stand on the corner."

There were cops in uniform, cops in suits, cops in golf shirts, cops in boots.

I stood and listened, and this is what I heard.

"Whoever was hit was dead."
"Me and you, do or die."
"Them plainclothes niggas was the ones that did it."
"There were guys shooting each other, and they started shooting at the cops."
"They didn't have to do it like that."
"This isn't the movies. This is the 'hood."
"They put him in a bag."
"He's dead."
"They put him in a black bag."
"It was like 1,000 shots it sounded like."
"That fucked me right up."
"That felt like the OK Corral."
"It woke me up. I thought I was dreaming."

They didn't say these things to me, they said them to each other. All the said to me was, "Hey, he's with the news." They referred to me in the third person when they spoke directly to me.

I went around the block to see the other side of the scene, at 115th and Fifth Avenue.

More of the same.

I approached another cop.

"You're going to have to go to DCPI with that."

A man named Jermaine told me what he thought happened. He saw part of it from his window. A few more people talked to me after that. Then I talked to a cop. He had his arms on the roof of his car, and he was resting his chin there. He looked weary.

"You doing okay?" I asked.

"Yeah."

His version of the story matched what some others had told me, minus the suspect being unarmed and the cops shooting him while he was down. The following is the assembled account of several people's testimony, all of whom made me skeptical in one way or another.
---
The officer arrived at the scene with a cup of coffee in his hand, he said, and the shooting started immediately. Some plainclothes officers had approached a "suspicious male," as the DCPI likes to call it, in front of the firehouse at 114th and Fifth Avenue. The suspect started shooting.

The cops shot back. The man fell, got up again, and started running. The cops yelled, "Drop your gun!!!"

(I should mention I'm not confident about the chronology. You can feel free to take any of the above sentences and shuffle them around. I am narrating the way I would play Tetris.)

A chase and firefight ensued. They took the path just north of the firehouse and ran through the projects. They got to 115th Street. They stopped there. There was much gunfire along the way. At some point, an ambulance took the suspect away.
---

Two hours after the shooting, I saw seven upside-down plastic cups in front of the firehouse. I assumed they covered shell casings.

Fifth Avenue was taped off most of the way from 114th to 115th Streets. There cops stood. Many cops, mostly there to guard the crime scene.

I talked to a bunch of young guys across the street from the firehouse. These are the guys who are most likely to get pulled over, and they are the ones about whom people say things like "50 percent are in the criminal justice system."

"He was already hit, already down, and they just let out on him."
"They're shooting down the block uncontrollably, I mean, there are people outside. This is the city that never sleeps. There are still people coming home from work."
"There are Asian people in my building, and even they came outside to see what's going on."
"When I got here, they were still looking for the gun. If they knew what was going on, they should have the gun."
"See that flashlight?"
"They need training. They need to go to Iraq."
"The cops were running from the scene, not to."
"There were cops coming out of the bushes in the projects."
Seeing that the suspect collapsed in front of a 24-hour bodega, one of the young men said, "He was trying to get a cold beer before he went out!"

A man's gotta sleep. I'll continue this later. Nighty-night, wherever you are.