Excitement Dies (Along with Man) on My Street

I've been living in this quiet suburb for eleven years now. The street the house is on is pretty major and gets lots of traffic, so it can get a little noisy; but overall it's a decent neighborhood and we've had pretty good neighbors up to now. One next-door neighbor, however, passed away a couple of years ago and she couldn't have been quieter. The family that "replaced" her is not bad, though. The most noise they make is an occasional small party and sometimes the kids play basketball and the noise of the ball hitting pavement is annoying, but no more annoying than the kids on the opposite side practing skateboard tricks on a makeshift ramp.

Well, one source of excitement for our street has always been the fact that a few blocks away lived a mentally ill man who sometimes didn't take all his meds and caused disturbances that brought about major police presence. As a matter of fact, four years ago I couldn't get home because the police had closed off the street from one major intersection to the other, about eight blocks. I wasn't even sure what the source of all this trouble was but found out through an unlikely source: a co-worker in a different city had lived here or knew relatives who did or something and he told me that a mentally ill man would sometimes go off his meds and cause problems involving the police.

So when last Sunday police started arriving en force and going toward that end of the street, I suspected our friend was off his meds again. Pretty soon things got serious and there was a fire truck, an ambulance, several more police vehicles, and a helicopter overhead. Eventually the police went about closing off the street again. And I saw police tape go up. At first I thought I'd imagined it but soon they had a bright light up, like the kind used in stadiums, and I could see it clearly so I thought: "This is bad. It's a crime scene now." Also, by then the ambulance had sped off with its siren blaring and so I knew someone was hurt. Actually, at the time I thought it was him, and that they'd managed to subdue him and he was being carted off to the mental ward. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. My brother discovered days later in the newspaper that there had been an altercation: the mentally ill man had gotten mad at neighbors for throwing a (presumably loud) pool party and had gone there with a six-inch folding knife which he then used to attack a man. In the article his mom was quoted as saying, "He's a very gentle and kind man" but I said, "Yeah, when he's not stabbing someone repeatedly in the head!" Unfortunately, all humor aside, the ambulance I guess carted off the neighbor for he ended up in county hospital in stable condition though he'd bled profusely from his stab wounds but the outcome was he had wrestled the knife from the hands of his mentally disturbed assailant and killed him in self-defense. All while a bunch of kids were in the pool!

I know that even though my street was at times inconveniently closed off, I will miss the excitement that poor crazy dude brought to this otherwise-quiet suburb.