my hero...
I was awoken at 5:45 am this morning by something I will never, ever forget: a young woman absolutely screaming "SECURITY! SECURITY! SOMEBODY!!!" She ran up and down my hall... screaming for help. What prevented her from simply hopping on the elevator and going downstairs to the desk... I don't know, but she went from my side of the hall, to the other side of the hall, and then back to my side of the hall. And there she paced... yelling, screaming for help. Well, at the first "SECURITY!" I was awake... wondering what the hell was going on. By the time she came back to my side of the floor, I was looking through my phone for the number to the front desk. I, unfortunately, do not have the number. I don't have the phone number of my own front desk... can you believe that?
This is right about the time I'd like to tell you all how heroic I was... how I burst open my door and saved that woman from the terror she was facing. I'd like to tell you that story... and, if it was my story, I would tell you that. But that's not what happened. Fact is, I waited... I waited until I heard another calming male voice (someone else on my hallway), before I opened my door. HE had called the police. SHE went to the elevator to wait for them. THEN I slowly opened my door (after looking through my peephole for about a solid minute) to look and see what was going on. Too little, too late. I said 'hello' to my two neighbors down the hall who had opened their doors to come out. And I noticed something interesting at that moment. The voice screaming was quiet obviously a black woman's voice... the man who called the police was a mid-forties black man, and the other man who opened his door was a twenty-something black man. I was the only white person on my hall who had opened my door to see if I could help a black woman.
And it wasn't someone I didn't know... it turns out that the woman screaming was the nice woman at the end of my hall. We had joked about my laundry once... and I know she lives with her very young child. I was only waiting in my doorway for about another minute and a half before the police showed up. At least five officers (that I could see) showed up. They went to her apartment... from what I could gather from the screaming and from one of the other men who opened her door, a man just came into this woman's apartment. He just opened the door ("No signs of forced entry" the police would say), and came in. That would freak my shit out, too. By the time the police came, the man was gone... meaning if I had stuck my head out in time, I would have saw him. She would later rant, saying "I should've shot that mother fucker."
I wish I could say something about being brave... but there's absolutely nothing I can say that will change the fact that, when someone needed me... when someone HONESTLY needed ME to help... I froze--too scared to move. I was too afraid to help. Afraid I'd open the door to help and get a gun pointed in my face. I'll give the Chicago PD some credit... when they're not firing psychos from ice cream stores, they're handling situations like this, and they seemed to handle it very well. Seemed to... I don't know if anything is actually going to happen now... if the "perp" will actually be caught or if anything will change besides my heartrate... or how safe I feel at night... or anything. Good morning.