Just a quiet suburban shootout

[michelel72]

I live in the suburbs. There's a certain image to suburbs, an assumption of quiet and safety. I live near an apartment complex, with its share of teenagers (or "punks", as I call them), and there was a break-in a few blocks away in which the family dog was brutally beaten a year or two ago, but I've been known to leave my doors open when running a quick errand and I don't really worry about crime for the most part. I assume any bangs I hear are fireworks; they always are.

I don't really expect a shootout less than half a mile south of my house.

Two quotes from that article strike me:

"I never thought I'd hear gunshots," a still-shaken Mulcahy said about eights hours after the 12:30 a.m. incident. "I thought that just happens in the big cities."

and

"Just after the end of the chase about 10 police cars showed up," [another resident] said. "I didn't think Attleboro had that many cars."

On the one hand, I find myself thinking come on, this is technically a city. But on the other hand, I find myself thinking ... yeah, exactly.

The strangest part to me is that I was almost certainly awake when it happened ... and I didn't know until I read about it the next day. I know I've lived in cities a while now and learned to screen out a lot, but still -- it wasn't that far away. I would have thought I'd have noticed.

Comments

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Yike! Scary! I hope that was a one-time fluke...