In 1981, I was 21 years old and had just moved into my own apartment, a one-bedroom ground floor in a garden apartment complex. $246 a month and that included heat and hot water which was to me “pricey†on my 21-year old’s budget back then even though I was making good money, but so great to be out on my own. I’d been working 65+ hours, sometimes 70+ hours a week managing a convenience store and was still recovering from the moving and unpacking, not all the unpacking having been done yet.
It was a Friday night and while I was working Saturday morning for another 12+ hour shift, a friend talked me into going out after work with her and see a band. I stayed for a while, not too long though, I was tired and the band was loud but not very good. I had a beer and IIRC, didn’t even finish it so I wasn’t drunk but as I said, I was tired and had to go to work at 5am the next morning.
I got home around 11PM, washed my face, brushed my teeth and got into my nightgown but since it was so nice out, a bit breezy and cool but warm enough to have a window open (late September) I decided to open my bedroom window. But the window, a slider type, was very hard to open, it kept sticking in the tracks like the previous tenant hadn’t opened in it years if ever. I put my hand on the edge of the window frame with my arm parallel to the window for leverage and as I tried to jerk the window open, my elbow hit the glass and the window broke.
“Oh crap!†I picked up the pieces of glass and put them in the trash can and wondered what to do next. Do I cover it with some cardboard and call maintenance in the morning? Do I call the emergency maintenance number now, at 11:30PM on a Friday night and risk not getting off to a very good start with management at my very first apartment? Do I call my dad? Nope. Wasn’t going to do that. Wake my dad up so he could call me a “dumbassâ€, likely repeatedly? So I decided to go to bed, deal with it in the morning.
I was close to drifting off to sleep when I heard the sound of muffled voices outside, the squawking of a radio and then saw the beam from a flashlight coming through my bedroom window. Then I heard someone banging on the door of my apartment and a deep loud male voice saying “Baltimore County Police. Open the doorâ€. Now I was wide awake and scared you know what-less.
I opened the door and the officer, on the young side even to a 21-year-old, and I thought darn handsome or “cute†as us gals used to say back then, showed me his badge and said someone had called because they heard glass breaking and thought there might be a break-in. Back in 1980, Owings Mills MD was a not bad neighborhood, but not great either, some rough spots, just beginning to become more gentrified but still affordable, but not without crime and there had been some break ins in the area recently including at my complex and as I learned later, a forcible entry and rape at the complex down the street a few weeks earlier.
I told the cop exactly what had happened, pretty much exactly just as I just told you above including having had one beer even though I don’t recall he even asked, told him I was really embarrassed but was glad someone had been concerned enough to call it in.
By now his partner, a much older cop who didn’t seem quite so friendly or “cute†was also at the door and asked if they could come inside. “Sureâ€. The older cop asked me, rather told me to stay in the living room with his partner while he, if I didn’t mind and I don’t think he was exactly asking for my permission, took a look around. He also asked me if there was anyone else in the apartment, “anyone you know or anyone you don’t know in this apartment, anything we should know about?†“No sirâ€. And he did look around, I heard him opening the closet doors, going into the bathroom and pulling the shower curtain back, I even heard the bed squeak as he must have leaned on it to look under it.
Meanwhile, the younger cop asked me if I had any ID. “Yes officer, in my purse†he nodded and I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it to him. Then he said like “but your driver’s license has a different address – why is that?†“Yes sir, that’s my parent’s address, I just moved in last week and hadn’t got to the DMV yet.†“Do you have anything that proves you live here?â€
Suddenly I had a vision of me at the police station, calling my dad after midnight to say I’d been arrested for breaking and entering. I’d be more than a just a “dumbass†if that happened. Then it dawned on me that I had a copy of my lease, it was sitting on top of an unpacked box in front of my 2nd hand thrift store bookcase. I told the cop where it was and he let me go over and hand it to him. He smiled and said “OK, that’s good enough for meâ€. Then he as he pointed to the still unpacked boxes, asked if I liked my new place, what I did for a living, where I worked, made other chit chat like he liked a particular picture I had on the wall over my couch, I think to make me more comfortable because I think I was on the verge of crying by now.
The older cop having determined that no one else was in the apartment, explained in a gruff but fatherly way that he needed to make sure I wasn’t under duress, being held against my will with some “bad guy hidingâ€, that I needed to be more careful, how some DW-40 would help those sticky window tracks then said matter of fact - “you’re bleedingâ€. The younger cop pointed to my elbow and asked if I had any band aids, “yes in the medicine cabinet†I said. He went and got one, came back and put it on my elbow. I must have cut it when it hit the window and didn’t notice, it wasn’t deep and not a lot of blood but it just added to my embarrassment. So I stood there in the living room of my very first apartment that I’d only been in a week, wearing my pink floral flannel nightgown and in my bare feet with a cop putting a band aid on my elbow.
The younger cop said he was glad I was OK and the older one, again sounding a lot like my dad without exactly calling me a “dumbass†told me to call maintenance first thing in the morning to get that window fixed and go the DMV and take care of my license next week. Then they left. And after sitting on my couch for the next 10 minutes or so, after calming down, I went back to bed.
This shooting made me think of this again and how different it could have turned out for me.
I hate to say it but things are different now and how I could of, under the same circumstances today, been thrown to the floor and tazed, strip searched for weapons or drugs, my apartment trashed as it was being searched, my dog (if I had one, shot) or shot myself, shot dead through my bedroom window by a cop outside before I even knew what was happening as I got out of bed to answer the other cop at the door, because I was perceived as a threat to them instead of possibly someone in need of their help.
Not that all cops are bad, I don’t think that, I actually know different based on an incident not long ago when I was staying at my nieces house (another long story that could have been tragic and necessitated a visit from the local police, but turned out OK*), but there is much more of a “us against them mentalityâ€, a militarization mindset, the swat team mindset, a shoot first and ask questions later mindset, the use of excessive and too often of deadly force where it isn’t warranted as if, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything is a nailâ€, instead of good old fashioned community policing like the cops who came to my door that night in 1981, the old “protect and serve†cops of the past.
If only the cop or cops had announced and identified themselves like the cops did when they came to my apartment back in 1981. She might not have “allegedly†picked up her legally owned gun thinking some creep was trying get inside instead of a cop doing a “welfare checkâ€. She, like me, might had had a rather amusing story to tell, “about that night I forgot I left my front door open and someone called the cops but the cops were really nice and concerned and everything turned out OK†rather than being dead. Not to mention her 8-year-old nephew who will forever have that moment seared in his memory about the night his beloved Aunt was shot by the police.
This woman did nothing wrong. Having your door open isn’t a crime. Like one of my neighbors back in 1981, her neighbor did nothing wrong either. He called the non-emergency number just to ask if the cops could swing by and make sure everything was OK out of concern. Why he didn’t do that himself? Why didn’t my neighbor who heard some glass breaking back in 1981 just not knock at my door himself? But aren’t we told “see something, say something� I bet her neighbor who must beside himself, second guessing himself, racked with guilt, will never do that again.
