Something Happened; It’s Unclear Exactly What

By now, most of you have heard some variation of this story.

I slept through this overnight brouhaha, which happened overnight between Sunday and Monday. It took a while to get the official story, and lots of unofficial stories came out before that.

Now, the police are limited by what the people involved tell them. But this story does not make much logical sense to me.

I don’t want to make light of this situation, because no matter what the real story is, creepy people were in the parking lot of the park doing something, probably something creepy. That’s not cool, creepy people. I live here. With my kids and stuff. Patrolling the parking lots should probably be on the police department’s To Do list from now on. But the story still stinks.

According to what they told police, these ladies went back at 1:30 am to look for a wallet in the park. Now, there are lights in the parking lot, but if they dropped the wallet anywhere else in the park, they would not be able to find anything, anywhere without night vision goggles. Maybe they had night vision goggles, and were just looking for the perfect opportunity to put them into use.

Meanwhile, the world’s most patient thief, who hangs around an empty park all night just waiting for someone to show up, finally gets his chance to steal something when a car with two women pulls in. And, as luck would have it, he’s ALWAYS WANTED a PAIR OF NIGHT VISION GOGGLES. Huzzah! So he sneaks in the back seat of the car, and demands their purses. Which he assumes hold the night vision goggles in this scenario.

He then flashes some sort of gun, which I’m hearing from unofficial sources and therefore I have no idea if it’s true or not, was probably a BB gun or a fake gun. Which didn’t mean it didn’t scare the two victims, because they usually look pretty darn real, but he didn’t shoot them — he smacked them with it. And the gun-smacking resulted in minor, treatable-on-site injuries of some sort. Again, this is nasty business; I’m not making fun. But I’m happy it wasn’t life-threatening business.

Then, the guy takes off running. With the purses? I don’t know; it doesn’t say. He’s long gone, and we are left with a weird, mysterious story that doesn’t add up. And the cops have to come out and investigate. And the neighbors have to worry, at least a little, maybe a lot.

I’m in the “a little” category. I think this was an isolated incident, but somebody somewhere got the idea that our park’s parking lot was a low-risk place to engage in weird behavior. I would prefer it to be known to low-lifes as a place to avoid because you’ll get caught for sure. But I am not concerned our neighborhood is about to be overrun by weirdos above and beyond the ones who already live here.