How a Saturday evening walk with the dog went sideways…
Sometimes when we least expect it, the shock of violence shows us who we are. It can be messy.
September 2018, Saturday 29th, around 18:40. The AFL Grand Final has been played and won a few hours ago. I’m walking our 9 year old Staffordshire Stanley around the neighborhood, as I do many times a week. It was to be a quick one, my wife Jade wanted me back for dinner by 19:15. I’m not much of a drinker anymore, so no beer during the game. I do enjoy the odd blunt, though, so I was fairly mellow.
It’s a safe area in one of the safest cities in the world, Melbourne, Australia. I’m 50 right then, 180cm, 100kg, long hair, beard, some tattoos — but more of a cuddly bear than a threatening or menacing looking guy. Even as the sun starts dipping below the horizon, and as usual, I don’t feel any particular threat. A routine but pleasant triviality, this walk. No hint that everything was about to get very surreal and dangerous. Right around the corner, as it turned out.
We’re 10 minutes in, walking along a four lane arterial road. Traffic is steady. I begin to vaguely register a general commotion off to my left behind a head high wall which runs all the way to a street corner, the one we’re about to turn down. Sounded like maybe a party was getting a little rowdy. A couple of kids screaming and some adults in terse rising/falling conversation. We turn the corner. Everything changes in an instant.
As we get past the wall, I’m startled to realize the ‘party’ is in fact happening on the footpath just a meter or two away…and it’s no party. I take in much in those first seconds, and make some quick assumptions. Some of these I’ll need to revise only seconds later. Like maybe my life (and a couple of others) depend on it.
Two girls are on the ground, embracing it seems. The younger one is screaming incoherently. She’s distressed, and intoxicated. I can smell the alcohol. Her ‘friend’ (first assumption) also seems quite out of it, but at least she has hold of the distressed one. There are two men, moving about around the girls. One of the men is quite young, very upset, and also intoxicated— he’s the other screamer. A late 30s looking Asian man is standing off to the side, seemingly unsure of what to do.
The young fellow is trying to get closer to the girls. Insistent. The older of the two is trying to push him off and away from them both.
A third 40s looking guy is next the girls, and talking on his phone. He also sort of engages the young screaming guy, who has snot running out of his nose in his distress and rage. It seems to me I’ve found myself in the middle of a group who’ve had too much to drink watching the match, and two of them are having a lovers tiff (second and third assumptions) that spilled out into the street. As I finish my visual sweep, which takes maybe 2 seconds, I lock eyes with this last man, phone guy — and he looks very scared. I don’t know it, but he’s already on the phone to the police.
‘Hey guys, everything cool?’ I ask nobody in particular as I move my gaze back to the girls. The non-hysterical girl looks back in a way that has me sense immediate danger. I will discover later her apparent ‘drunken’ look was due to severe pain from a broken rib she had just received tackling her ‘friend’, the hysterical one. In reality, they had met just seconds earlier. Hysterical girl, who I now see is just a teen, catches my shirt as I’m leaning in. “He’s trying to kill me!’ she says. She repeats it, quieter but with more insistence. “He’s trying to kill me!”
At this point I notice her left arm, the one reaching for me, has a huge slash running from wrist to halfway down her forearm. It’s deep. Shockingly so. It’s gushing blood. She has blood everywhere, actually. ‘He’s got a knife!’ the older girl whispers urgently.
If you’ve ever wondered how you would react in a critical situation, one thing I can tell you is a lot of stuff you imagine being difficult in the moment happens automatically, instinctively. There was no hesitation or consideration, no weighing alternatives, no run through of possible scenarios so I could choose the safest option — which would have been to stand back and call the cops. Not my circus, not my monkeys. I know none of these people, I’m out of shape, and the only ‘weapon’ I have is a 15cm metal torch (in my pocket) that I carry so I can pick up after Stanley in the dark. I’ve got Stanley in my ‘gun hand’ with his lead. I cannot let him go. He’s my little guy. He’s also a little daft. My sudden awareness of danger to him is huge. My awareness of danger to the girl is far bigger. Whether I like it or not, I’m involved. I keep Stanley behind me, and step in between the girls and the screamer. He backs up a couple feet.
I quickly take him in. He’s around 16. Shorter, tinier than me. Skinny, actually. He’s not only rotten drunk, his eyes reveal another substance at work here, one that ratchets everything up a level. Methamphetamine. Quite a bit, from the look of him. I have worked my whole life in music and the events industry, or lecturing college ‘kids’. I’ve seen it before.
He’s screaming/crying — and keeps trying to get to the young female. The guy on the phone has gotten out of the way and is talking to the police. The 30s looking Asian guy, Albert, steps in right then. Phone guy also comes back to help. We are trying to keep ourselves between him and her without directly putting hands on him. We talk to him. I start reassuring him “Everything is cool, we’re on the same team, we’ll figure this out, man, just relax!”. We’re trying to de-escalate him. It’s not working very well, although he does start to interact with us, drawn away from his target. He says a few things I catch. It’s a drug affected hoarse voice that croaks/screams (to her) “I love you! I can’t have you leave! I’ll kill myself!” He also says “Everyone’s blaming me! She cut herself! She tried to run into the road!” All the while attempting to push past us and get to her. I don’t see a knife. I have seen a cut, though, so a knife is there. Somewhere. Its presence is massive. Still, to cover another threat, I turn to the older girl “Hold your mate! She’ll run!” “I don’t know her!” she says back. Huh.
On the third or fourth attempt to get to her, which I’m having none of while also trying to establish rapport with meth unit, I put my arm out to hold him off and push back. I’ve now put hands on him.
The next few seconds are seared into my memory, they replay in slow motion sometimes at night. He turns his full meth addled gaze on me. Pure, utter fury. The scream is now at me “Don’t you put your f — king hands on me! I’ll fu — ing kill you c — t!” he advances, quick. I put about half a meter between us. His hand goes into his pocket, fishing for something. My torch is in my pocket. I don’t have time. I have Stanley and can’t let him go or he’ll run under a car, probably. He has the road sense of a pebble.
Here’s the messy bit. My body freezes. I can’t move. More on that later.
I can talk, however. I say, with all my soul, “Mate, RELAX! Everything is COOL, brother!” I’m serious. That’s what I had. With a guy advancing on me, probably armed. The miracle? It f — king worked.
His face crumples, he seems to fold in on himself, he drops to his knees. “I’m being blamed, but she cut herself. I want to die. I will kill myself!”. He stands, and without another word, steps into 60kmh traffic.
Two cars less than 30 meters out slam on their brakes, avoiding him, and each other, by millimeters. I have the torch out now and start flashing other traffic to warn them. The guys grab him and bring him back to the nature strip.
Which is when the young female bolts across the road into the same traffic, screaming. We all turn toward her, she gets across safely. Then the young guy goes after her, quick as a rabbit. An SUV traveling at 60 can’t avoid him in the third lane across, he’s hit, hard. The sound of it is unique and sickening. He’s airborne for a short moment. His shoe comes off and spins in the air in surreal fashion, then falls heavily into the road along with him. We’re sure we’ve just witnessed a fatality.
Less than two seconds later, though, he’s up. He’s straight after the girl. Fast. Albert and I look at each other, and sprint after them.
As we’re running across the driver of the SUV is out of her vehicle and clearly distressed. “I thought I kill him!” I reassure her “Not your fault, he’s crazy!” She gets back in and looks set to drive off. I tell her to instead pull over and wait there. Everyone else (by now several others have been drawn by the commotion) stays on the original side of the road.
The next little while is a bit blurry. The four (five with Stanley) of us were boxed in at the entrance to a gated estate. I know I had the girl in my arms at one point, reassuring her we won’t let him get her, we’ll protect her. She put blood on my clothes. I tried to get her to sit on a low brick bench and hold her arm up. She passed out at another point. Stanley tried to revive her by licking her face. I think Stanley was a quiet intimidation to the assailant, giving him just one more reason to not go all out. The torch in my hand gives me a little more confidence, and Albert and I back each other and are running two levels of defense, with me the last line while trying to help and reassure her. She’s terrified but also high as hell. It is becoming clear to him by this time that our intervention is firm, non-negotiable. He can’t get to her. Albert, Stanley and I keep the crazy unit off her until the police roll up a few minutes later, closely followed by an ambulance crew. A big, competent cop corners and contains meth unit. He’s calm and professional. The girl is seen to by ambulance staff. I approach them to warn about her running, but they are worried by Stanley and tell me to “Back off with the dog mate!”. They ignore my repeated warnings and she runs again. They have to tackle her in the road. I manage to alert another attending police member that young guy is possibly armed. Then I stay back to watch them arrest him (ugly, he resisted a lot). I stayed back so nobody else saw Stanley as threatening, and shot him or anything. As they literally throw crazy kid into the divisional van, I call Jade to come get us. The whole thing lasts 21 minutes.
I couldn’t sleep that night until I got up and wrote out the entire incident on notepaper so I could make a coherent statement to police. The next day I retraced steps, and cross referenced phone call times to work out the timeline. I’d called the police at minute 18 when the guy backed right off for a time. This got it out of my system a bit. I referred to those handwritten notes for this piece.
The thing I couldn’t get past, though, and what kept me up nights, was that if he’d been able to pull a knife and tried to stab me, I’d probably be dead or at least severely injured. I’d frozen at the critical moment. I spoke to a therapist for a few sessions soon after to figure it out. An earlier, aberrant, abusive relationship with a very violent female partner set that reaction up in me, it turns out. I may write about this another time. I do train a little now, and rehearse scenarios in my mind to ingrain a different reaction to personal threat, if I’m ever suddenly up against it again. I do think that’s unlikely, at the same time. I further realized during this debrief/unpack that despite that level of incapacitating fear, I still stepped up and repeatedly put myself in harms way for the safety of a young female stranger. That helped me box it up, so to speak, and put it aside.
I caught up with the older ‘girl’ and her husband, phone guy, a few days after for a coffee. They were staying with her mum in a house adjacent to the corner, and had come out to see what the problem was, perhaps 30–40 seconds before I got there. We thanked each other for not walking away, for trying to help those two. They were faithful Christians, and had assumed the same for me. They were startled when they discovered I was atheist. They still think God put me there to help. I’m fine with that.
I called the police station several times to offer my statement. None was ever taken. Nobody has called me back to this day. The couple moved away and I lost their number. I never managed to find Albert again, although the couple thought he was from the Estate we all ended up running into after the traffic incident. I did thank him at the time, and he’s a hero. If he’d not stepped in, it could only have been worse. Perhaps fatal for one or more of us.
The knife ended up being found by police right where the original incident happened, on the ground. None of us really know how this started for these kids, who had apparently just been kicked off a bus right there for us all to happen upon. The couple told me this in one of our few texts later. They did have their statements taken and kept up with the case for a while — I wish I still had their number.
Did she cut herself? Did he cut her? Was she the one trying to run into traffic, deranging him in the process — or fleeing an already deranged boy who meant her extreme harm? I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. The chaos of those two drunken and drugged teens was powerful and terrifying. I do think he was most likely the instigator and aggressor, though. He was pretty feral. She just seemed lost. I wouldn’t change anything I did, no matter how it went down. I simply refused to let her be hurt more if I could stop it.
I saw the young guy about two months ago at a local supermarket. He was right there, but didn’t see me. I avoided him, although along with a chill the urge to front him did pop up. Just for a moment. He probably doesn’t even remember.
