Where's The Police?....Neighbors and I Join Together To Stop An Attempted Rape

I was awaken early Saturday morning by the gas company digging two holes in my yard to plug gas leaks. Second time in less than eight years I've had my yard dug up for leaks and it's the fifth time all together on my block in that same time period. When the energy company shows up on a Saturday to dig up your yard it should have told me this wasn't going to end up being a ordinary weekend.

They can make quite a bit of noise, it's not like you can sleep through all that. Seems the clamps that hold the pipes together rust which causes the hemp lining to wear which creates a hole. At least that's how he explained it to me along with a history lesson. The pipe was put in in 1910, laid by hand....by real men he said. Back in those days he said they physically dug the holes and manually installed the pipes, there wasn't any machinery that did the heavy lifting or digging. He took me over and showed me the old clamp laying down in the hole, he was right it's pretty much rusted.

Sort of hard to imagine that rusted piece of metal was the only thing holding those pipes together. He said now they use a rubber wrap around the pipes.

Sort of hard to see the wrap since some of the dirt fell back in the hole. One interesting find they did come across though was some blue clay. That perked my ears right up. I have had to have my house lifted in the back before. A old friend of mind in construction did it, he and other professionals I had look at it were stumped for a reason as to why it settled. The other professionals didn't want to do it because they couldn't guarantee it wouldn't settle back down. I think they were afraid when I told them there was a dispute as to what really happened to the house that sat next to mind. One story is the husband destroyed it during a nasty divorce, another was that it settled so much it wasn't fixable. My neighbor on the other side of that house had the back of his lifted and nothing happened to it since. I thought it had to do a lot with water and my old neighbor said that at one time there was a old creek bed back there. That probably holds a bit of truth given it does look like the houses were built on the banks on a creek. The houses behind me all site up higher then mind and their yards all slate down toward my property. After winter came the first year I lived here I took on so much of their water you could have went ice skating back there when it froze over. It was always so moist back there, it wasn't unusual to find slugs over a foot long hanging around back there. So my neighbor and I set out to build a berm along the back property line to keep their water off our property. We pretty much did that by letting the neighbors know we'd take trimmings, bushes, branches and leaves from them. They'd come drop them in the empty lot and we'd take and place them along the property line. It took a couple years but we were successful in stemming the flow. Now I am working on making the berm bigger, those neighbors don't rake their yards so their leaves have decomposed almost to the level of my berm. Now that I live on the other side of my duplex I noticed other area's of concern where I see ice build up near the back porch and steps. When I replaced the steps a couple years ago I filled in underneath them with concrete on a slope so that if it rained hard enough to overflow the eave troughs the water would flow out into the grass. Last year I dug up that area of the grass and re-positioned that on a slight slant away from the house. I was absolutely amazed at the amount of water after a major storm that flowed off into that area, it would stay wet for a day or two. Now that I've found out what's in the soil underneath I am glad that I did. I was always pretty convinced it was the water that caused the problem, stemming the flow seemed, at least in my opinion, worked because the problem subsided. Not that I wasn't always troubled with what if it's not or what if it happened again, how could I deal with this even more if water was the issue to guarantee my kids wouldn't face the same issues some day. When the gas guy handed me a piece of that blue clay I came into the house and looked it up. Seems blue clay expands when it comes into contact with water. The sites went on to say it could do devastating damage to sidewalks, driveways and buildings. It's a relief to know that the clay combined with all that water has a high probably of being the cause but ultimately what this means is that in the future I will have to have a professional company come out and foot the house to a more stable soil under the clay. Twenty eight and a half years to find a pretty probable answer, I am glad I never gave up fighting the water for if it wasn't for the water the clay wouldn't be able to expand and contract. My guess would be that the person who said it was a old creek bed before they cut it off to put in the highway was more than likely correct since blue clay forms under and alongside bodies of water.

"The culprit"

So anyway as my weekend progressed it didn't appear that it was going to turn out like the bang it came in with. After they left I took a nap then went out to get something to eat. I decided to go sit at my favorite park for awhile then take a walk, it was close to dusk but not quite as dark as this picture portrays, I tried to edit it but it kept taking out the beautiful color of the moon I happen to notice when I glanced toward the lagoon.

It was full and lit with a bright orange hue, it added a bit of serenity to my day. After my walk I went shopping for a bit then came home to walk the dog. It was rather warm out, really quiet, maybe to quiet considering how the day sprang forth. It didn't appear to be any of the college houses having any parties, quite unusual I thought, then as I got half way up the block on the next street there was a college party going on but they were barely noticeable. Overall it was eerily quiet and not many people around. After I walked the dog I came home to blog for awhile. I was blogging away when I heard a woman scream. That in itself isn't unusual with the college parties, maybe someone slips ice down someone's shirt or something and they scream, the problem though was the screaming wasn't coming from the direction of the only house having a party and the scream sounded more frantic. She screamed again...I knew something was wrong so I decided to call 911 and say there's a woman screaming somewhere out front of my house and it's more of a distress scream. The phone was still ringing to 911 when I heard her scream she was being raped. I ran to go outside while waiting for them to answer, I got halfway down the steps when they answered and told them there was a woman screaming she was being raped somewhere outside the front of my house. They asked for my address, as I exited the house there was a girl standing on the sidewalk across the street, I asked her are you the one yelling for help. She said no but she heard it to and was trying to figure out where it was coming from. Then we started yelling into the park and the girl screamed I am over here. I told the police the girl was somewhere in the park and we were trying to locate her. The girl who was helping look for her reached her first, she yelled back at me that she found her. When I got there the girl was hysterical, lucky for us the guy decided to take off running so we didn't have to deal with him, she started telling us what happened but she was so distraught things weren't coming out in order. He put his hand over her mouth, he walked up to me talking about his job, he tried ripping my shirt off, he pushed me to the ground. It took a bit for the cops to get there, once she settled down a bit it appears he approached her, she said he had a beer in his hand, he started talking about his job, then she said he grabbed a hold of her shirt and tried to rip it off, she screamed, he pushed her to the ground and covered her mouth, she said she grabbed him by his balls and started to squeeze, in that scuffle she managed to scream she was being raped. Finally the police showed up, they pulled up alongside the curve, got out of the cars, started walking towards us then ran back towards their cruisers. Then one said to the other one you want to stay or take this one, must have been talking about a call that came in. One of them stayed while the other one took off with sirens blaring. Apparently from what I gathered from the news the next day and approximate time they showed up there was someone driving around shooting at people. What seemed so odd to me was here's a call about a woman being raped, sure we got to her and she was safe but it took them about a half hour to show up....as we are looking for this girl she could have been being strangled, stabbed or as defenseless civilians facing someone with a gun but no cops, no sirens, no nothing, just a few neighbors who joined after all the commotion of us screaming for the girl trying to find her. You would at least think that a woman screaming she was being raped would be considered in immediate danger especially since we didn't know where she was or how deadly the situation could have been that it would warrant a cruiser with sirens blazing to scare the dude off the girl. To me it's absolutely crazy to leave people stranded, they didn't even call back and say there will be a officer on the way we are really backed up and we appreciate you guys staying with her until we can arrive, then they get there only to high tail it back towards their vehicles. I looked at them like where do you guys think your going...like we want to be out here all night babysitting your job. The whole entire night it was quiet up until that point, I hear every police, ambulance and firetruck that gets sent out, tonight I was bewildered by the lack of response considering it was overall just calm and quiet. Quite a few years ago during a thunderstorm I was standing on my front porch with my kids. My son said look mommy that guy is having sex with that lady. I looked over into the park but I didn't see anything. Then there was lighting that lit up the park and I seen a guy on top of a woman. I called the police and it's like they flew out of the woodwork. I bet two minutes hadn't passed since I made the call. He wasn't raping her, they just decided it would be fun to have sex in a park during a storm. This is where we are at now I told my son, ten, fifteen years ago there'd been here before it happened, give it another ten years and you'll be waiting three hours for a response on a rape call. That's what happens when you grow a city without any constraints, they are so "happy" they get listed as a up and coming city, a great place to raise your family, yeah until that up and coming place ends up being the next Detroit, Chicago or Baltimore.

As for the rest of my weekend?....it went out with a bang to, severe thunderstorms, but that was like music to my ears. We haven't had a whole lot of rain let alone thunderstorms this year.