Tag Archives: 911

May25

We Really Dodged a Bullet That Time

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Jerico does not like gunshots or other loud noises.

Content warning: guns, gunshots, bullet, danger, gun danger, potential for death.

I heard the gunshots, but I didn’t pay much attention to them until Jerico the dog tried to hide from them. He’s scared of gunshots (and most other loud noises) and he tried to get away from these in the corner where wires connect solar components. I didn’t want him damaging the wires, so I coaxed Jerico out of the corner and into the bed with me. I told him everything would be fine.

Gunshots are not unheard of where we live, but they are certainly not a daily occurrence. Occasionally we hear someone pop off a few rounds, but we chalk it up to target practice and go on with our lives. We live in the Wild West. Tumbleweeds roll down the dirt roads (for real) and sometimes guns are shot.

On this particular day, the shots went on and on. They were coming fast, but we could tell they weren’t close, so we went on with our lives that Friday afternoon.

I was lying in bed, messing around on my phone. We’d gone a little hike earlier in the day, and the heat and the sun had worn me out. I’d been lying in bed, messing around on my phone since about 3:30. I’d told myself I’d get out of bed at 4 o’clock and start dinner. Four o’clock came and went, and I was still lying in bed, messing around on my phone.

(Have you ever read the Dear Prudence advice column by Danny M. Lavery on Slate? I thoroughly enjoy reading that column; it’s what I was reading that Friday afternoon instead of cooking dinner.)

The Man was lying in bed too, watching television. He got out of bed and went into the kitchen. He stood at the sink facing the long window that runs across most of the width of our little trailer. I’m not sure what he was doing there in front of the window. Maybe he washed his hands. Maybe he prepared and ate a peanut butter sandwich. When he completed his task, he walked back to the bedroom in the back of the trailer and flopped down onto the bed. I’d heard shots the entire time he stood in front of the window, but I didn’t think the shots were close enough to worry about.

I’ll get up in a few minutes, I told myself. I’ll just finish reading the most recent column, I told myself, then I’ll get out of the bed and cook dinner.

Suddenly I heard a loud thunk! Something had hit the trailer!

Get on the floor! The Man yelled. Get on the floor!

I jumped off the bed and crouched between the exterior wall and the platform that lifts our mattress a few feet off the floor and provides under-bed storage for our three solar batteries. Jerico followed me out of the bed, and I held onto him so he wouldn’t leave the bedroom to meet The Man where he was lying on the floor between the bathroom and the hallway cupboard.

The Man grabbed the first phone he saw (mine) and dialed 911.

Some manic is shooting at my house! I heard him say to the emergency dispatcher who took his call. My window is busted out!

This is our kitchen window after the bullet went through it. Shattered. Busted. Scary.

When I’m lying in bed, my view of the kitchen and the kitchen window is mostly blocked by the wall between the bedroom and bathroom. While I’d heard the thunk of the bullet hitting the front window, I couldn’t see that the glass had been shattered from the impact. From The Man’s side of the bed, he had a clear view of the window and the sink below it. He’d seen the shattered glass before he jumped out of bed and threw himself onto the floor.

I heard The Man tell the 911 dispatcher that the police would never be able to find our place. He said we would meet the officer on the main road.

Com on, come on, The Man said to me once he hung up with the emergency dispatcher. We have to get out of here, he said as we fumbled around for our shoes. I managed to slip my feet into my grey Crocs; The Man ended up in his bedroom slippers.

We hopped into the truck, not knowing if another bullet was headed our way. The Man drove us to the main road, expecting to see a police officer at any moment.

Immediately after fastening my seat belt, I texted our nearest neighbor.

Someone shot out our front window, the text said. I sent the message at exactly 4:30pm.

The next event of note was the call from the deputy sheriff who had been dispatched to handle our emergency. He called to say he wouldn’t be able to respond to our situation for some time. He said we should give him directions to our house, then go home and wait for him there. It was as if he didn’t realize that someone had shot a bullet through our window and into our home. Maybe gunshots and bullets weren’t a big deal to him, but they certainly were important to us that afternoon.

While sitting in the passenger seat of our moving truck, I tried to wrap my head around what had just happened. I had many questions and no answers. Who had shot the gun? Where had the shooter been standing when the shot was fired? Was there a sniper on the loose? Had someone just killed his whole family and the bullet through our window was a byproduct of a massacre? Had the shot that sent a bullet through our window been made on purpose or by accident? Had a gun been fired at our window because the shooter thought our trailer was abandoned?

After calling the 911 dispatcher twice more and making known his displeasure with the runaround the deputy sheriff was giving us, The Man pulled the truck off the road. Neither of us knew what to do.

After a few minutes of sitting on the side of the road, we saw a sheriff’s department truck heading in our direction. The Man laid on the horn and the truck pulled over. The Man whipped our truck around and pulled up behind the deputy, but left quite a bit of distance between the two vehicles.

I really don’t want to see you get shot, I told The Man, so he got out of the truck with his hands high in the air. I kept my hands where the deputy could see them too.

The deputy was a woman, but she looked more like a girl. She probably wasn’t older than 25, but she looked about 15 years old. The Man talked to her outside, so I couldn’t hear their conversation.

Another sheriff’s department truck pulled up behind our vehicle. A short man walked over to where The Man and the female deputy were talking. I couldn’t hear what the new arrival said either, but The Man was back in the driver’s seat shortly. The deputies were going to follow us home.

We drove down the long dirt road with the deputy sheriffs behind us.

When we arrived at our property, we showed the deputies the shattered glass of the kitchen widow at the front of our trailer. When The Man and the male officer looked for the bullet on the floor inside, they found a small hole in the platform supporting our mattress. They then went outside and found the exit hole in the back wall of the trailer.

I think it was the female deputy who found the bullet. It was lodged in a wooden block supporting a small propane tank. Usually we had a bigger, taller propane tank sitting right there providing fuel for our refrigerator and stove and furnace and water heater, but when the large tank was empty, The Man put the small tank in its place. If the large tank had been sitting there, the bullet would have struck it instead of a block of wood. We imaged there would have been a large explosion and a fire.

The bullet that went through our trailer lodged in this block of wood. You can see the small propane tank sitting on top of the wooden block.

(We are probably wrong about the explosion and fire of our imaginations. According to the Propane 101 website,

…it would be hard to say that a propane tank will explode if it were hit by an airplane or bullet.

Yes, you can watch YouTube videos of people shooting propane tanks and ending up with fireballs, but the ones I’ve seen have involved a source of flame like a garden torch or road flares. In retrospect, without some additional fire source, I don’t think a propane tank would typically burst into flames upon being shot.)

After taking photos of our shattered window and getting our names, driver license numbers, etc, the cops took the bullet and set off to do some further investigation.

About that time, I received a text from our neighbor They had been out on a hike and only received my text about the shooting when they returned home. She said her husband JayJay was on his way over to our place.

Our neighbors are good people. They’re in our age group, funny and pleasant to talk with. Whenever they visit, they leave while I’m wishing they’d stay longer. They’ve come over for dinner, and JayJay has helped The Man with several repairs on our truck. Sometimes when we’re out for a walk, The Man and I stop in at their place, and sometimes they stop at our place to say hello. Of course, COVID-19 and the required physical distancing precautions have put a damper on our in-person friendship. However, a bullet through our window seemed to take precedence over the virus, and JayJay came right over.

Based on where the bullet entered our trailer, it seemed like there were only a few places from which it could have been shot. The most likely location, in JayJay’s opinion, was a place that seemed impossibly far to me. It was about half a mile away, but JayJay said the direction of the wind and the size of the gun (a .308) made it entirely possible for the bullet to travel that far.

JayJay asked The Man if he wanted to go talk to the people at the house where he thought the bullet had come from. I understood if The Man was a little hesitant. Those people had guns and (obviously) bullets. JayJay said he’d go with The Man, and The Man agreed. I stayed home with Jerico.

The Man and JayJay found the place from which the bullet that went through our window had been fired. The deputies had been there earlier. The cops asked the young men at the house if they’d been shooting. The young men told the cops they’d been shooting a .22; of course, the bullet that struck our trailer was from a .308, so the cops left without arresting anyone.

When The Man told the young men that a bullet from a .308 had shattered our window and traveled through our entire trailer, they all grew contrite. The fellow whose property they were on began weeping and embraced The Man.

Most of the young men at the house worked on a crew together. They somehow knew our neighbor and had come out to his place for a Friday night of fun. They had been partying for a while, and their party consisted of drinking whisky, eating barbecue, and shooting guns, among other things. The property owner told the visitors they could shoot the .22 but to leave the .308 alone. Of course, as soon as he walked away from the party, the visitors fired the .308. They told The Man and JayJay they’d heard the bullet ricochet, but the hadn’t been aiming at our trailer and they certainly hadn’t meant to hit anything.

The property owner offered to pay for our window. I don’t know it that’s actually going to happen, but I do appreciate the sentiment and the $20 bill he insisted The Man take. It’s difficult for me to stay mad at someone who is truly sorry for making a mistake. Of course, if The Man or I or (Heaven forbid!) Jerico had been injured or killed, forgiveness might have been a little more difficult for them to come by.

The next morning, I moved in front of the shattered kitchen window and calculated where I might have been standing had I been cooking dinner when the bullet came in. Had I been stirring vegetables cooking on the stove, I would have been ok, even with a bullet moving through the house. Had I been doing something in front of the left sink, my right arm would have probably been hit, grazed at best. If I had been standing at the right sink, I would have been hit between my breasts and my belly button. If I had been standing in front of the right sink, I might not be telling you this story today.

The Man measured the bullet’s path. If it had come straight through the trailer with no downward movement, it would have hit him where he was lying in the bed.

This is what our shattered window looked like from the outside.

Luckily that bullet had neither of our names on it. Luckily, neither of us was hurt. Luckily, no one’s life was ruined because some young men allowed alcohol to ruin their judgement.

No, I’m not scared to live where I do. A stray bullet could go through a window in Dallas or Detroit, Phoenix or Fargo, New Orleans or Nashville. For real, it could happen anywhere. Surely, a bullet through our window is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

On Saturday morning, we removed all the shattered glass from the kitchen window and covered the big window hole with cardboard. Now we’ll add “kitchen window” to the list of all the things we’ll eventually need to buy. Still, a kitchen window is a small price to pay. That bullet could have taken a life instead of a bit of glass.

I’m glad to have lived to see another day. I guess you could say Dear Prudence and procrastination saved may life.

Jun21

The Girl with the Broken Arm

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I never saw the girl with the broken arm, but I did speak to her father.

I knew something unusual was happening when one of the workers from the main parking lot approached the mercantile. It was the middle of a busy Friday, and I didn’t think she’d have walked over without a good reason.

I just happened to be outside talking to Javier the camp host when Cindy the parking lot attendant walked up. She told us a girl had broken her arm on the trail. Cindy had walked over to the store with the girl’s father.

Do you want me to call 911? I asked. Cindy said yes, and the man nodded. His eyes looked blank, and he seemed exceptionally calm.

I burst into the Mercantile and asked the other clerk for the phone. A girl broke her arm on the trail! I explained. The other clerk handed over the phone, and I punched in 9-1-1.

I saw the father had followed in into the Mercantile. I’m going to coach you so you can tell them how to get here, I told the dad. He continued to look blank, as if there were nothing going on behind his eyes.

Calling 911 (or AAA, for that matter) from the Mercantile was an ordeal. Since the campground didn’t have an actual street address, the dispatcher always had great difficulty finding our location. An address associated with our phone number did pop up on the dispatcher’s computer screen, but that address was fudged and existed in a tiny community fifteen miles from our phone’s actual location. Invariably, the dispatcher asked for the nearest cross street, which was a few miles away. After four years on the mountain, I knew what to say to get the help visitors needed, but most tourists barely knew where they were, much less how to convey that information to someone in an office in a city in the valley.

In the long seconds between the rings of the phone, I asked the dad where he was from.

France, he said with a thick accent.

My plan of coaching him went out the window. A language barrier on top of our remote location would have simply been too complicated. I decided to speak to the dispatcher myself.

The language barrier also explained the dad’s blank expression. He wasn’t necessarily drugged up or tuned out; maybe he only understood a small fraction of the words being spoken around him.

The 911 operator answered the phone and asked about my emergency. I explained a girl had broken her arm and the father was French, so I was helping by making the call. Then I said we were in a remote location, thus beginning the ordeal of explaining where to send the first responders.

Once the dispatcher finally pinpointed our location, she had some questions about the situation.

She asked how old the girl was. I relayed the question to the father.

Ten, he replied after a moment’s thought.

I gave the information to the dispatcher, then she asked how the injury occurred.

Again I conveyed the question to the father, and this time had had to think for a longer while.

She fell from a horizontal tree, he finally said.

It’s dangerous to climb on horizontal trees!

I repeated his words to the dispatcher, who seemed satisfied with the answer. She then said she was going to connect me with the ambulance company so I could explain our location to their dispatcher. Oh joy.

Moments after I’d walked into the Mercantile and asked for the phone, moments after the father of the girl with the broken arm had followed me in, a tall, imposing woman with a French accent had also come into the store. I found out later from Cindy that this woman had been translating for Cindy and the family of the girl with the broken arm. I didn’t get a good look at the woman, but I clearly heard her tell the father (in English!) that she was giving him a tablet to give to her daughter. It was a pain reliever, she said. You must trust me! she said. I didn’t mention the tablet to the 911 dispatcher because I didn’t know what the drug was or if the girl had actually ingested it. (Later, after he father had left and then returned, I asked him is the girl had taken the tablet. He said she had, then told me it was ibuprofen.)

Despite specific instructions not to move the girl that I had relayed from the ambulance dispatcher to the father, when the father returned to the Mercantile, he told the other clerk that now the entire family was waiting in the shade near the entrance to the campground.

An EMT from a nearby fire department (and by nearby, I mean 25 miles and 45 minutes away) arrived before the ambulance and accessed the situation. He cancelled the ambulance after telling the parents the girl would probably be more comfortable if they drove her to the nearest hospital instead of continuing to wait for the ambulance. (The parents were also likely saving themselves a pile of money by not giving their daughter a ride down the mountain in an ambulance.)

I never found out if the girl’s arm was actually broken or if she’d only sprained her wrist. In any case, the lesson to be taken from this tale by all adult caregivers, regardless of their nationality? Don’t let children for whom you are responsible play on horizontal trees.

I took the photo in this post.
Oct11

Something Terrible

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Something terrible happened.

A young man died

and I found his body.

I woke up Thursday feeling kind of off. I still had enough sick-time hours to cover my workday, so I left the campground I was babysitting and drove the few miles to my campground. I spent the day working on my book and taking down my privacy tent and generally resting up for the weekend. After eating dinner around 4:30, I felt well enough to put on my uniform and check-in some campers who’d just arrived. As I prepared to drive back to the campground I had to babysit, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been to the group campground I was responsible for since the previous morning. So after emptying the iron ranger at the parking lot, I headed over to the group campground.

I didn’t see the pickup truck until I was on the road running through the middle of the group campground. It was parked as far to the left side of the road as possible. It was still partly in the road, but there was just enough room for a vehicle as large as my van to pass it.

I thought the pickup probably belonged to a hunter. It was deer season, and hunters in pickups were all over the place. I thought the hunter had left the truck there and had gone out past the meadow and into the trees to look for a buck.

I noticed a bag of charcoal in the back of the truck. It had been opened, some of the charcoal removed, then the top edge rolled closed, In addition to telling the hunter s/he was parked in a $126 per night campground, I wanted to make sure s/he knew charcoal fires were prohibited.

I didn’t think I would actually talk to the person who’d driven the truck into the campground. I thought I’d end up leaving a courtesy notice under a windshield wiper, but I decided to try to make personal contact before I wrote out a notice.

Hello! Hello! I called out when I left the van. I looked around the campground, but I didn’t see anyone walking about or sitting at a picnic table.

I approached the passenger side of the truck and peered through the dusty window. To my surprise, I saw someone sitting in the driver’s seat. Judging from the person’s short hair and flat chest, the person was male. His face was unlined, young. He seemed to be sleeping—eyes closed, mouth slightly open—although the position of his head and necked looked extremely uncomfortable.

I knocked on the glass of the passenger side window with a series of knuckle tingling thumps—no gentle taps for this camp host in a hurry. The young man’s eyelids did not flutter. His shoulders did not twitch.

Wow! I thought. That kid’s really sleeping hard!

I had a new idea.

I went back to my van and sounded the horn. Honk! Honk! Honk!

Then I laid on the horn for several long seconds—Hooooonnnnnkkkkkk!!!

I walked back over to the truck and peered through the dusty window again. The young man had not moved. At this point I started getting worried.

I rapped loudly on the passenger side window again but saw not a flicker of movement.

I began to focus on my attention on the young man’s chest.

Throughout my nervous life, I’ve concentrated on so many chests—those belonging to children and pets I was caring for, those belonging to the boyfriend I hoped would die in the night and the boyfriends I hoped would live. Always, if I stared at the chest long enough, always, the chest would eventually move. This time though, the breath had run out. I saw no rise, no fall, no movement, no nothing.

I beat on the window with the flat of my fist. Bam! Bam! Bam!

No response. No movement of the young man’s chest.

I thought I should try knocking on the driver’s side window. Maybe the young man was just a really deep sleeper. Maybe the young man was chemically altered. (But his chest wasn’t moving. I knew his chest wasn’t moving. I knew what it meant that his chest wasn’t moving.) I tried to get to the driver’s side window, but the truck was parked up against trees and brush and there was no clear space to easily slip through.

I went back to my van and honked the horn, then laid on it again. When I got back to the truck, the young man had not moved a muscle. Although I was beginning to have to believe he was dead, I pounded on the window a few more times; of course, I received no response.

I stood there and wondered what I should do.

I’ve seen enough cop shows on TV and read enough mystery novels to know I did not want to be the hapless individual who stumbles upon a murder scene and destroys evidence or gets accused of the crime. This didn’t look like a crime scene, but what did I know? I didn’t want my fingerprints all over everything.

Should I try to do CPR on this guy? I haven’t had CPR training in nearly twenty years. Would I remember what to do? Better question: Would CPR do this guy any good? I remember reading or hearing somewhere that CPR can sometimes keep a person alive until EMTs arrive on the scene, but CPR alone is probably not going to save anyone’s life. Even if I got past the brush and dragged the young man out of the truck and performed CPR on him…No professional medical person of any kind was likely to happen down a winding dirt road and into the group campground to take over from me and save this guy’s life.

I decided the best thing I could do was call 911.

Of course, I was nowhere near a telephone. So I jumped in my van and drove fifteen miles to the campground where my boss was stationed. There was a landline there. I drove as fast as I dared on those mountain curves. (Slow down. I’m in a hurry, I  heard a former co-worker quote her grandmother.)

When I arrived at the campground, my boss wasn’t there. The camp host didn’t know where he was or when he’d be back. I was on my own.

I called my boss’s cell phone first and left a message on his voice mail saying I’d found someone I thought was dead and was calling 911.

The 911 call was a farce. The dispatcher had me spell my name but still got it wrong when she read the letters back to me. She asked me the last time I’d been in the campground, and I said between 7am and 9am the day before. She said, So 10am yesterday? Was she even listening to me? Finally, she asked if I could go back to the campground to guide the first responders to the body.

Yes, I said. I can do that.

I sat at the end of the road to the campground for nearly an hour before a deputy arrived. He had me drive in first, while he followed behind. I parked in front of the truck and got out of the van. The interior of the truck was dark, and I couldn’t see the young man in the driver’s seat. I hoped he’d woken up, left the truck, walked out into the meadow to take a leak or shoot a deer, or anything at all, really. I was totally willing to look like a fool for calling 911 if only the young man could be alive.

The officer shined his flashlight into the cab of the truck. The young man was still there.

He hasn’t moved, I said softly.

The officer tried to open the passenger side door. Locked.

Then he squeezed between the truck and the trees and the brush and tried the driver side door. Unlocked. He opened the door and the overhead light came on. I saw the officer reach in and put his fingers on the young man’s neck to check for a pulse.

In a few moments, the officer stepped from the side of the truck and said to me, He is deceased.

Then the officer rummaged around in the back of the dead man’s truck. He told me there was a small charcoal grill behind the passenger seat. He said it had evidence of charcoal that had been lit, but whether the young man had been trying to kill himself or stay warm, he didn’t know.

Medical personnel arrived and the officer and the EMT both squeezed between the truck and the trees to look at the dead man. They managed to get the door open and the overhead light was on again. The officer pointed out the charcoal grill and said he thought the man had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

If carbon monoxide had killed him, his face would be red, the EMT said. Carbon monoxide poisoning would make his face red like a tomato, the EMT said.

I can vouch for the fact that his face was not red at all.

The deputy and the EMT agreed the young man must have died from suffocation. The fire used up all the oxygen in the tightly closed truck, and the young man had nothing left to breathe.

The EMT left, and the deputy took my statement. I told him I had a group scheduled to arrive in the campground the next afternoon. He said the mobile morgue was on its way and the body and the truck would be going in the morning.

I went back to the campground where I was spending the night. I felt empty and old. I kept remembering how the young man’s face looked while I was trying to wake him. I know it’s a cliché to say I kept seeing his face, but it’s true.

I don’t know if I should write about what happened. It seems so personal, not so much for me as for him. Should I write about a stranger’s death? I was there, for part of it at least, so now this death is a part of my story too.

Please, if you’re going to leave a comment on this post, please be compassionate. I don’t want to read anything negative about how this young man died. I don’t want anyone telling me what I should have done. I did the best I could under the circumstances. I think the young man probably did the best he could too. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but this time, please share the negative ones with someone else.