Tuesday, 24 October 2023

On Saturday, October 21st, I was practicing the piano. As is my custom I had headphones (the piano is electronic, and I make lots of mistakes that I prefer not to share with the world). The headphones provide a pretty significant degree of sound isolation, but nevertheless at some point I began hearing yelling or shouting. I wondered if maybe it was some high spirited high school kids passing by, even though that is not something that happened before.

It continued, and so I took off my headphones. It was definitely loud voices, though I couldn’t tell if it was kids horsing around, or something else. It was hard to tell where it was coming from, so I stepped out onto the front porch, expecting the disturbance to be coming from somewhere on the street. As it turned out, the street was empty; the noise was coming from the north side of our house.

Our house is close to our neighbors on the north, with only a sidewalk and driveway separating them. Both houses are three stories high, and thus there is a sort of alley between them. That is where the sound was coming from. I went to the north edge of our screen porch, and tried to look down the driveway. I could see someone shouting, and it looked like our neighbor J, though for her to shout would be very out of character. She’s quiet and reserved, and I’ve never seen her even raise her voice. Yet, she was shouting, and appeared to be shouting at someone. It was strange and startling.

Around this time I heard someone else shouting ‘get away from each other.’ My astonished apprehension turned to alarm, and I rushed back into the house, through the hall to the back door, and out to the gap in the lilac hedge that separates our yard from our neighbors. As I did this my wife, also alarmed by the noise, was coming down the stairs and came after me onto the back stoop. Looking through the gap I was horrified to see J on the ground, with her arms upraised, and a man –- whom I recognized as her brother – kneeling over her and punching her repeatedly in the face. I could also see that it was M, the neighbor who lived on the other side of our neighbor, who was shouting. He was on the other side of their fence and shouting “Stop, stop.” (Oddly, much of this is kind of a blur to me; he could have been shouting something else, but he was trying to get them to stop. I’m confident I remember the gist of what happened; I am less sure of the details of who said what, or what happened exactly in what order. )

I yelled to Katie to call 911, and ran over to them. I grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him up and away from her. He stood up and turned towards me and said ‘She stole 2.1 million dollars from my family.” I said something like “This won’t solve that,” and M, who had run around the fence and come into the yard, was shouting “Get away from each other.” The brother — who goes by N — turned back in the direction of J with his fists clenched, and I thought he was going to start beating her again. I could hardly believe it. I stepped between them and probably said something about staying apart. I’m not quite sure what happened next… I think N backed away, and J staggered to her feet and ran back to her house and went inside. Katie hadn’t been able to locate her phone, so I ran inside and upstairs and called 911. As it turns out, they they had received other calls. I ran back downstairs, and Katie and I went out into the backyard, which was now vacant. Katie was worried about J, and went up and knocked on the back sliding glass door, and called out to J asking if she was all right. J came to the door, and then came out and sat with us on the back step. Her right temple was bruised, and she was cradling her wrist. She said she had called the police, and started talking about what happened. The phone rang: it was 911 calling back, and she told them she was OK and sitting with neighbors. After a minute I realized I had no idea where N was, and fearing that he might come back, I suggested that we move around to our front porch so we could see when the police arrived and also, though I did not mention it, where we could easily take refuge in our house behind a locked door, should Nick return and be inclined towards further violence.

As we waited for the police we got the story from J, interspersed with apologies for ruining our weekend and our assurances that it was OK and that her safety was far more important. She said her brother had problems with managing his anger, and that they had been in fights before; that the most recent episode had been triggered by her deciding to put her house on the market and telling him he had to move out; that their fight had begun in his apartment (he lives on the third floor of the house which is separate from the main house); that he had threatened to kill her and had grabbed two butcher knives; that she rushed outside thinking that she would be safer, which is where our neighbor Matt and I had come into the picture, alerted by the yelling.

The police finally arrived – it took 20-30 minutes, but in their defense they had called and determined J was safe and with neighbors – and they got her story, and our story. They also talked to our neighbor Matt, and sometime during this went up to the third floor apartment, talked to N, and handcuffed him and took him down to the squad car and eventually to jail. They also summoned an ambulance and EMT for Jenny, and eventually took her to the hospital. I was impressed with the two officers, and the way they handled things. One was very matter-of-fact, and the other, while also matter-of-fact, seemed compassionate, which was nice.

Sunday morning we learned (via a text) that J had been released from the hospital and was back home. We’d offered her a place to stay, but she declined. Apparently she can lock the main portion of the house, and her brother does not have a key. While, the previous night, she had been talking about getting a restraining order, by the morning she had decided not to. N was in jail for the weekend. And, not unrelated, the tenant who lived in the second floor apartment moved out abruptly; she was apparently ending her tenancy next week, but once she heard of what happened (she was away for the actual event) she decided to make an immediate exit.

We also stopped by to chat with M and his wife, where I learned that N had two butcher knives when he went out into the yard after his sister, but had apparently tossed them somewhere and used his fists. M had been staying on the other side of the fence because of the knives, but when he saw me enter the back yard he came around then fence into the back yard as well. I think it was very fortunate that there were two of us — neighbors from each side — to intervene: that there were two of us probably made more of an impression, and also I’d like to think that it made the intervention more of a collective thing – both neighbors were intervening and saying this was not acceptable, rather than a single person thwarting his intent.

Monday morning a police sergeant called me and interviewed me, on the record, about what I saw. I gave an account similar to what I wrote above. N is apparently not out of jail yet, but presumably will be released today or tomorrow, and presumably, because he has no other place to go and there is no restraining order, will come home. That will be odd. We wonder if he bears us any ill will.

That is where things stand for now.

Ick. I didn’t like writing that down. I hope there will be no more to add, and that in a few months the house will have been sold and all parties to the dispute will be elsewhere, hopefully at separate elsewhere.

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