A Run-in with the Law

So, we had a little excitement at our place last night. After Michael took the boys to swimming lessons and I returned home from visiting Amy Hymas and her new baby, Faith and Tyce Kearl came over to play some games. Michael got a phone call from his sister, Mel, in Utah telling him that there was a lunar eclipse and he and Tyce went out to look at it. They came in and said it was pretty cool, so Faith and I went outside to see it. We were standing in front of our apartment building looking up, and it was kind of cool – you could see a brown spot on the moon from where the Earth was blocking the sunlight. We stood out there for a few seconds, and then I said that the eclipse was cool, but that it was too cold to stand out there any longer to look at it.

So we started to walk back inside, and as soon as we did a lady came into view down on the street in front of our building. It was dark out and she was yelling at us to stop, using profanity, and pointing a gun at us. So we ran inside as fast as we could. I think we startled our husbands when we ran in and locked the door. We told them what had happened, and I said that the lady yelled “Police,” but Faith hadn’t heard her say that. But I have heard enough stories of bad cops hurting people or bad people impersonating police officers, that I wasn’t going to wait around outside while someone was aiming a gun at us to see if she really was a police officer or not. So, when we heard four officers come into the hallway outside our front door and they were yelling, when Michael went to the front door, I didn’t want him to unlock it. I thought that it would be very strange for a police officer to aim a gun and yell profanities at two people for no apparent reason, so I thought that if it really was an officer, and she did want us to come out of our apartment she could calm down, explain herself, and show us her badge before barging in.

We soon realized (by watching through the peep hole in our front door) that the officers in the hallway were not calling for us to open our door, but they were calling for someone to come down from upstairs. We kept watching as the teenage boy from upstairs came down and when they asked him who else was upstairs he said that it was just him and his mother and sister. I then overheard the officer say that they don’t mess around when they get reports of a gun. We kept returning to the door to peek out, and first they had the boy handcuffed, then later on the mom and the girl were there handcuffed too and they were reading them all their rights.

At this point I started to feel bad because I didn’t want the officers to think that the mom and daughter were the ones they were chasing outside and have them get in extra trouble for running away from the officers when it was really us. So I cracked open the door, and the officer told me to wait inside. After a while the mom and daughter were no longer in the hallway, it was just the boy. The officer knocked on the door and came in and I apologized for running away. She said that there were reports that the boy was shooting a gun out of the upstairs window and that there were two females with him, so we had really bad timing for going out to look at the moon, because she assumed that we were those two females from the report. She made it seem like we were pretty dumb for running away when she told us to stop, although I still feel justified for running from a person screaming and swearing at us in the dark and aiming a gun at us, even if that person did say they were the police. So, the officer took our names and information, just to note in their paperwork that neither Faith nor I were the ones with the gun, and then she left.

We were talking after that, and commenting that we didn’t think the boy could have actually been shooting a gun out the window above us or we would have heard it. I can tell you that both Faith and I, and probably Michael and Tyce too, had an adrenaline rush after that. (I had never had a gun pointed in my direction before).

I was rather concerned that the boy living in our building could possibly have been waving or shooting a gun, and wondering if we needed to be concerned about our family’s safety, so today I called the police department and asked about last night’s incident. I was told that after all that, they found out that it was not a real gun. She said it was a soft air gun and we didn’t need to be concerned. (So, because the boy upstairs wanted to play with fake guns, Faith and I got a real gun pointed at us). That was quite a little adventure. And it is a relief to know that the boy upstairs is not some kind of psycho.