Five Years Ago Today....

I can still remember certain moments of that time like they happened yesterday.

There was that scary day when five shootings happened; one of them was outside Leisure World. The company I worked for at the time bought lunch for everyone so that we wouldn't walk outside to get lunch. Needless to say, I wasn't working in this business... but I digress. When I found out one of the shootings was outside Leisure World, I called my grandmother since she lived there.

There was the time when one of the shootings happened at a KFC near one of the bus lines I took back then. I actually flagged down a cab rather than wait outside for a bus that would take me home. When I told my father I did that, he said, "I don't blame you."

Then there was the time when I literally saw a woman *run* to her car from the curb at a Shoppers Food Warehouse. I was standing behind an awning.

The day it was reported that they thought they had the suspects, I wrote a set of lyrics to a song called "Desperation." I just had to get those feelings off my chest...

 

I barely went outside for 3 weeks. I went to a grocery store with underground parking and like Hustle, I found a mostly protected gas station. I spent a lot of time at the mall when I was going stir crazy. At work, we ate at the restaurant in our building almost every day b/c we were all afraid to go out.

Friends of mine were vacationing down near Charlottesville about 2 weeks into it and I gladly went to spend a couple of days with them. I was still super-cautious and nervous, though and I remember feeling really freaked out when I had to get gas at a big, exposed gas station.

 

My grandparents were living in Alexandria at the time, and in this business you go visit when you can. MrsExpendable insisted that we gas up well off the beaten path. I spent numerous weeks in Alexandria as a child, and I couldn't tell you of anything that's well off the beaten path there, especially a gas station.

It was a scary time. My dad says he believes he passed their car on the night they hit the Ponderosa in Ashland. After they were caught, he told me that he remembered passing a blue beat up old-style Chevrolet Caprice on I-95 around the Kings Dominion area, that looked like what was being shown on televsion (everyone was looking for a whte van for the longest time). He also remembers thinking to himself that you drive what you can drive -- and wondering if they could make it to their destination before the car fell apart. Unfortunately if it was them, they did.

 

Those two guys were profiled recently on some TV show. I think it was "Notorious" on A&E. I thought they might rerun it today but it's not on the schedule. Pretty good stuff when I saw it though.