LETTERS FROM HOME: FACING THE TRIGGER-HAPPY GLOOM ON LORIMIER STREET

Oct. 26, 2000

Dear Leslie

A teen-ager was shot to death last week in the park on the other side of our fence. A grudge killing, police say. A year-and-a-half ago and half a block away, Debra Ann Poch came home from a night of drinking and apparently mistook her house for another. While banging on the front door, she was shot and killed. The occupant of the house said he was afraid serial killer Rafael Resendez-Ramirez was at the door.

There's a term for people who shoot first and ask questions when it's too late: Trigger happy.

I had just gotten off the phone with the man who was going to put new storm windows on our house when the shots began last Thursday afternoon. I ran to the kitchen window and saw people in the park scattering. I ran back to the phone and called 911. The dispatcher said mine was the second call. She asked if I'd seen anybody with a gun. I hadn't.

More shots rang out as I returned to the window. A woman in black was running south on Lorimier Street.

That's where Jesus Sides collapsed and died, in the middle of our street, running for his life.

A man in a big white hat walked too calmly toward the front of the park. Another man got into a bronze car parked next to the park and sped away. By the time the police got there, most everybody was gone.

After the woman was killed last year, the five college women renting the house next to ours quickly moved away.

There is an impulse to leave, move somewhere the sound of gunplay is rarer, and that impulse may yet win us. Every day I ask DC how she feels about living here. "Scared," she says, "sometimes in the night."

There is even an impulse to arm ourselves, to do something to make us feel safer. But all those ICBMs didn't make anyone feel safer during the Cold War.

Arming ourselves would be a declaration of war. I do not want to be at war with people I live among. To separate the world into good guys and bad guys denies the knowledge that all of us are capable of being both.

All the lessons we should need about carrying grudges are being learned in Jerusalem. As for shooting a drunken woman at your door, irresponsibility and fear are deadly combinations. None of these people should have had a gun in their hands.

I no longer abide the National Rifle Association and its apologists defending the rights of gun manufacturers to sell handguns no matter what the cost to our civilization.

The rest of Cape Girardeau saw these images on TV and read about these shootings in the newspaper, but I suspect they are as unreal in the neighborhoods along Lexington Street and in Twin Lakes as the fighting in the Middle East.

DC and I grew up in a Cape Girardeau that wasn't like this. We can remember walking down Lorimier Street without looking over our shoulders. Our dream is to be able to do it again.

Love, Sam