Bye-Bye, Good Sam

Friday the 13th. Usually it’s a good day — no different from any other for me. However en route to work, things went bad about the time I saw what I thought was a man struck and knocked out of a cross walk at Vassar and Harvard Ways. I immediately turned around to go give aid if he needed it.

I watched the suspect car, a silver Dodge Intrepid,  continue speeding west on Vassar.

The man I’d seen rolling on to the sidewalk was squatting down behind a clump of bushes next to a community health center. I didn’t think it was weird as humans like animals will go hide when injured.

As soon as he saw me though, he came out from behind the brushes and walked across the street to me. That’s when I asked if he was okay, to which he relied he was fine, having jumped from the car because his “wife was pissing me off,” and not having being struck by it.

Then he asked if he could get a ride out of the area because he didn’t want her coming back and causing more problems for him. I said I would and he hopped in my truck.

Instead of pulling a u-turn on Harvard, I drove into a vacant parking lot to turn around. I was looking at the man riding in my passenger seat, asking him where I should drop him off, when his eyes grew big. I turned my head to look and found myself being rammed by the silver car.

She shoved the car up under my truck. The pre-teen boy sitting in the passenger side seat next to her had a terrified look on his face as I backed off of the hood of her vehicle.

Immediately, I put my truck in park and started to get out. That’s when the driver of the other vehicle, a Latino woman, about 5-foot-five inches and maybe 110 pounds, got out of her car and started rushing at me. I stepped back two or three times because she had something in her hand and it worried me that it might be a gun.

In response I pulled my folding lock-blade knife from my pocket and opened it up. As I did this, I saw the man coming around the front of my truck and I figured I had stepped into a domestic argument and I’d end up having to fend both of them off.

After a few seconds, I saw she was holding a shoe, not a pistol as I’d feared, so I put my knife back in my pocket. While I stood my ground, the woman continued screaming at me in English about having run into her car with her son in it, then in Spanish at the man, then back at me for trying to kidnap her husband.

By this time we were face-to-face, so close that our noses were touching. I didn’t smell alcohol, nor did she have the odor of burnt cannabis and I couldn’t detect a fruity scent to her breath — a sign of diabetic acidoketosis — so I concluded she was purely in a psychotic rage or suffering from a bi-polar disorder.

Without turning my back on her, I returned to the cab of my truck and retrieved by cell-phone, dialing 9-1-1. She kept screaming, “Go ahead and call the f*cking cops! I don’t care!”

As soon as she realized I was calling the police, she returned to her car and drove away in the direction she had first been travelling when her husband bailed from the car. Her husband took of northbound on Harvard Way, putting as much distance between himself and the scene as possible.

Meanwhile, I completed my conversation with the dispatcher, having told her all the pertinent information she asked for, including the fact the car had no license plates or even a registration tag in the window. I also never got the name of the man.

In the end, I continued towards work, where I concluded I will never stop to help another person out no matter  how badly injured they are or aren’t. I also decided to no longer carry any kind of self-protection again, as I have a very dark spot in me that is willing to injure, maim or kill with the slightest of provocation.

It took me nearly two-hours to complete the online police report and to talk with a Reno Police officer after beginning my shift.  All in all, I’m fortunate as interfering in a domestic dispute can result in death, and I walked away unscathed and my truck has only the slightest ding in the fender, not even worth talking to the insurance company about.

I will admit, I’ve nursed a very tender low-back — worse than usual — since the hit-and-run.

In the end, I’ve been given two pieces of advice.  My wife says, “You shouldn’t pick up strangers,” and my co-worker, Neil Tyler says, “Don’t give up on humanity.”