Ericaland

I met with Brenda on Friday post-work for wedding related discussions. It went well and I headed home around 8 pm. About 4 blocks from home on my last leg of walking around the lake, I looked across the street and saw three guys running quickly into an apartment parking garage. It seemed a little suspicious, but I thought maybe they were just trying to catch up to a friend. About 2 seconds later I hear really terrible screaming and I start debating in my head whether I should call 911. Shortly after that I hear a man yelling for help, and then I decided to call.

So while continuing to stare across the street and trying my best to talk to the 911 operator, I notice the same three guys that had run into of the parking garage, run out of the parking garage. They were across the street, but they were directly across the street from me. At this point my brain just sort of stopped working all that well. All I could remember thinking was, “I should probably not be here” and “hopefully me talking to this 911 operator is going to keep bad things from happening to me”.

After a couple seconds of blanking out, I realized that the three guys had jumped in a car and driven away in the general direction of MY APARTMENT. A distressed man came running after and I could hear him yelling that he’d been robbed. At this point I felt a little better because he didn’t look injured. The terrible screaming from before had made me think that someone had been stabbed.

The robbed man somehow magically managed to flag down a cop car before I could cross the street and tell him I had called 911, so by the time I reached him, he was busy talking to a policeman. I told the 911 operator that everything seemed under control, hung up and walked home still pretty scared.

The good thing was that a cop just happened be close by and several other people besides me had tried to help the guy had been robbed.

The bad thing was, that even though I was talking to a 911 operator, she was trying to connect me to the emergency Oakland police line, and I was on hold the entire time. This doesn’t make me feel safe at all.

Also, you’d think I’d be able to run away if I saw people who most likely committed a crime running in my general direction.

Completely unrelated to this, we’ve found a venue and set a wedding date. I hope to get save the dates out soon.