I didn’t have a gun. I had never fired a gun, and I didn’t own any measure of protection aside from a baseball bat that I kept under my bed. It was a Louisville Slugger, heavy and strong, but what would I even do with it? I had never contemplated the need for it. I recalled when my youngest was in kindergarten and a dad dropped his kid off for a playdate at the apartment and he asked me if I owned a firearm. I was taken back, and later a little miffed. Why the fuck would I own a gun, and are you labeling me as a gun owner because I am a single woman? I started to wonder, should I be asking that question when I drop my daughter off to play dates? How about adding in, do you have any potential pedophile cousins hanging around? Far more dangerous and sneaky than an unloaded gun.
Guns were not in my vocabulary, but after a gun man appeared on my garage roof, I would understand this dad’s question. In South Central, in a less sheltered area as the higher rent white neighborhoods, as a single woman, a gun made a bit of sense. I had always been about not causing damage to my own heart and the hearts of those I love. I was more concerned with internal warfare in my life than the presence of fire arms.
One month into our residency in South LA in 2021, a man had walked into a house a block away and murdered two people. I didn’t know these neighbors at all and now they were dead. Thank God the kids were at their dad’s house at the time. I also had no idea it happened, or the man fled to my roof. For all I know, the gun could still be somewhere hidden in the dark crack behind my garage between the grey stucco and the fence. I had no interest in venturing back there to find the death weapon as a quick glances indicated broken bottles, spider webs and dark leafy areas that are either banal or horrific in your imagination, depending on your mood on that given day. The garage was nowhere near a renovation project in my mind, so it just sat there in its dilapidated state.
The day the shooting occurred, I saw cops and fire engines down the street and a chopper was hovering endlessly over our neighborhood. The sound was deafening. The neighbors were amassing next door, and so I went out to ask what happened.
Jose, one of their visiting family members said, “I saw the guy come running out of a house. He came running this way, and I told him, dude not here, not in our space. We are all family here. There are kids. Go to another block. I don’t care what you do, just don’t come here.”
Satiated that danger had been averted, I returned back into my house and put on my noise cancellation headphones because I was losing my mind at the low dipping chopper, and promptly started looking for Air BnB mountain retreats. It was 105 degrees in this urban madness, and Covid, the lack of socialization, and now the violence, had me dreaming of fir trees and mountain tops. The beaches were closed and hundreds of thousands of people were dying. I wanted to disconnect with the chaos on the street. As I scrolled through wooded listings with hot tubs and silence, I grew aware a pounding had grown louder? Was that my door?
I pulled off my headphones and walked tentatively to my door.
“Yes, can I help you?” I asked, hoping it was the Fed Ex guy. I was waiting for some new sheets and the mail delivery was spotty these days with lack of employees.
“Police,” replied a gruff voice.
I swung open the door to face two big Irish-looking white officers. Behind them, my lawn was teeming with cops. No exaggeration, like 14 cops on my front lawn.
“Uhhhh, what’s up?” I said, feeling faint.
They stared at me like, you stupid ass woman, in their black polyester uniforms and brass badges. I couldn’t think anything but how hot they must be in those outfits.
“Ma’am, are you aware that someone ran into your yard with a weapon?”
I was dumbfounded. “No.”
“And he got on your garage roof.”
“My garage roof,” I said in disbelief and horror.
That was when they filled me in on the details of the double-homicide, and when the neighbor told the murderer to go away, he had apparently circled around and come back through my gate which was ajar so the Fed Ex guy could deliver my new sheets.
When they came in the house and saw my sliding glass door that led to the back, and the detached garage, the officer said, “You are very lucky. He could have smashed right through those doors with you inside oblivious.”
I gulped down panic inside.
“Can we get the recording off your Ring camera?” the big cop number two asked.
“I am so sorry, it is not recording currently….” I replied.
He looked dumfounded, but not more dumfounded than me of how ridiculous I was not signing up for the $9 Ring subscription to save money. $9 and I can’t help a murder investigation. Old beliefs of financial scarcity die hard. No pun intended.
They looked in the back for the murder weapon and then they went away.
Two people dead. Murdered. Four houses down.
Now I was left pondering what it takes in that split second moment before you decide to kill someone. The power in that momentus act to take a life. The ultimate last word. The final blow. Pulling the trigger not once but twice and knowing that death would be in moments for these people. To hold such a place of authority of life. You are suddenly in charge of life or death when you invade someone’s house with a gun and intent to kill. Do people always have intent to kill? The murderer had a last meal. Was it a pastrami sandwich down the street at Rays? Lunch with his mom? Taco from the truck? Or was he cleaning the muzzle of his gun. Is it a muzzle?
The hood moved on like nothing happened. Like, loud music and carousing with a party in full swing next door, and I thought, they have either seen this before or they know better to spend more valuable time mulling. Mind your business. Nothing to do with me. The double homicide is already old news. And it’s not personal.
But I made it personal, and it took me down a dark rabbit hole. Despite my intuitive knowing that I was safe, this land was safe and that God wouldn’t have led me on the arduous enlightened journey here, to buy this house, to drop me in a cesspool of war, I started making lists.
I had to protect me and my girls.
The list started innocently enough. Sign up for the $9 Ring video service. Duh. Or maybe, add on a more professional surveillance system where the guys come in the little cars with a gun. Definitely an extra dead bolt on the front door. Maybe two. There’s that metal pole that connects to the floor. And the sliding glass door needs metal. Lots of metal everywhere. And a German Shepard. What about a German Shepard Guard dog? Would also solve the stray cat pooping on the yard problem.
Or a gun. I should just get a gun.
The gun may have come on the list before the dog but you can see where this was headed real fast. I was spiraling. Fear had me in its grips. People are murdered every day everywhere. Rich, poor, old, young. The fact that it happened down the street for me was not evidence that I was a fool for moving here. I wanted to ground into faith, but my journey of self actualization had only just started. I couldn’t trust. My connection to God was like a battery on its last year. Fully running till the day it just won’t start. You jump start it, and it runs again for few months. I had a whole page of items when I was done of what when combined in efforts would be the equivalent of a poor man’s Fort Knox.
I was suddenly in the Sam Peckinpah movie Straw Dogs and as helpless as Dustin Hoffman to protect his wife. I tried to reason with my fears and be rational. I would say to the one spiritual voice, you know we don’t measure our energetic space with the space of other people. And the nasty judgment voice would say, you stupid girl, you clueless cow, batten down the hatches. Get some metal over that sliding door. Call the armed forces. Get a boyfriend who gives a shit! And none of this had to do with living in “South Central.” Versace was shot, Biggie Smalls was shot, people are shot by countless maniacs in schools and buildings and parks. Anyone can just have a bad day and get a gun and shoot someone. The test to get a gun is about as hard as a driving test. Did cars kill even more than guns? My fear in my house wasn’t even about the gunman. It went a lot deeper into a history I couldn’t shake. Lack of safety in my childhood home. Predator down the hall. Being in the known and unknown simultaneously. The gripping fear of self-annihilation.
I took spiritual action to experience immediate relief. Knowing tobacco deflected away evil from my Shaman retreat pre-Covid, I rolled an American Spirit cigarette and blew the smoke all around the house. I had done this when I moved in but had not done it around the garage. That explains it, I thought. I had left a portal for bad energy to come in. I saged the place but I still could not shake the paranoia.
After this incident, for at least four months, every alarming sound got to me. People put off fireworks in my neighborhood all the time, for no reason or season, and the fireworks for professional sports are seen and heard from my lawn. Each explosion big or small, I could feel my nervous system leaping inside. One time I made the kids lie on the floor away from the windows as I thought the fireworks show for the NBA Finals was a drive by. The quandry was I didn’t truly feel unsafe. Even from the gunman. I felt secure here despite what the environment was presenting. I was solid in my house, with the ancestors, and my ancestors, and every day I claimed the turf more and more as mine. A conditioning that I SHOULD be over emotional, and scared, and was missing the signs of what to do was underfoot. I was clogging my essence of expansion and peace over someone else’s mental problems that ended them wielding a gun up on my roof. I was feeding a dark legacy of unsafe and untrusting, combined with societies cutthroat message of it’s a fucked-up world. My mind would work over and over that I wasn’t “safe.”
My best answer was to face what I feared. I went to the gun range with my friends and shot a gun. A client had told me how he had trained his daughter on a gun and I should have a gun to protect my daughters. In order to train my daughters, I would need to be trained myself. I called the only girlfriend I could even remotely recall had shot a gun, and she and her husband took me to the range. They were incredibly knowledgeable about handguns and patient teaching me to handle one.
“I posted on Facebook years ago I shoot guns,” Christina told me. “And I lost a lot of friends.” We decided there would be no posting.
After I stopped jumping out of my skin at every blast, I shot Christina’s dad’s pistol from WW1. The bullet came out of the gun with a little blast of red fire like in a comic or a cartoon. I was empowered by the idea of holding and shooting a gun and keeping my house and my daughters safe. I considered buying a gun. I talked it over with my daughters. No one wanted a gun. It felt complicated. I dropped the idea.
It took a full six months after the gunman was on my roof and no other incidents of violence to go back to feeling completely safe. One day I woke up and knew I had finally moved on. Sounds in the night didn’t scare me and I didn’t watch the Ring cameras while in bed before I turned off the light. I also stopped watching other Ring community members posts. I didn’t want to feed into the collective fear. The battle ground was not on the land with the house. It was within me. It is within all of us. Once it is understood it’s not the external forces that cause us the most trouble on this earth, we can peel back layers of societal misunderstanding and look towards more mental health and financial peace. In order to be an example, I had to hold myself in strength and the power of my identity. Looking straight at my purpose and destiny without messing around anymore with external fear. Shit happens. Go through. We may think we are being invaded, but if we look at what’s happened, we are being called awoke.