Monday, June 14, 2010

Ho Hum, Another Bullet Hole...WHATEVER.



Blog post and photos by John Hoff with borrowed camera

So yesterday I was walking in an alley near Hillside Ave. N., checking out the area where there had been a dramatic police non-shooting a few days before. Three shots were fired by the police at a thug trying to pull a gun from his baggy-ass thug pants, but all three bullets missed their mark. The incident was covered in dramatic detail on the Hillside Chronicles blog, click here and also here.

(I say if the bullets made the thug duck, dodge, cower and NOT shoot back, the bullets were both justified and served their purpose)

While finding my way through the alley--I was within sight of the house of City Councilman Don Samuels--I noticed a hole that didn't belong in a metal barrier blocking the alley...


I should point out the metal barrier in question has a number of holes in it, but the other holes are symmetrical holes and appear at regular intervals. This particular hole...well, it's different. Bullet holes in metal are quite familiar to me because we had three such bullet holes in the large white-painted mailbox of my rural youth. Almost every day of elementary school, while waiting for the yellow school bus, I would stick my fingers in those bullet holes, contemplate them, contemplate my boredom with the bullet holes and their unchanging nature.

I should point out that, in a sense, there were SIX bullet holes, because the bullets went in one side of the mailbox and out the other.

I should also point out that shooting up signs and mailboxes is popular in certain VERY rural areas, and just because there are bullet holes in your mailbox doesn't mean you should take it PERSONALLY.

In fact, after the mailbox was replaced many years later after being damaged by a car, well...some of us thought the three bullet holes were cool and BELONGED in the mailbox, like a family crest. I'm just saying.

Anyway. Bullet hole. Yup. Been there. Seen that. Ho hum.

In an unofficial forensic investigation right there in the alley, some of us decided the bullet hole might NOT be from the incident where the three shots were fired. Heck, it might be an old bullet hole from a previous incident. Who knows? And, in a sense, who cares? WHOEVER shot the round, WHY EVER they shot the round...

It apparently missed its intended target.

So, that was cool. Next entertaining thing, please...


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do you know it didn't pass through the sign and hit it's mark? Maybe the sign was at another location previously. So you didn't say why is the sign there in the first place?

Anonymous said...

This had about as much journalistic significance as something Morton Downey used to banter about on his show.

Geektopia said...

WAY earlier incident. At least six years old.

And the shooting last week was 4 houses down... and towards 22nd Ave.

But good work anyway, Columbo.

Johnny Northside said...

To the first poster: it's not a sign, it's a barrier to block the alley. If the alley wasn't blocked, it would be full of illegitimate traffic.

To the second poster: not every post is meant to be hard hitting, sometimes I'm just contemplating an individual grain of sand instead of the whole beach.

To the third poster: Not sure if you're being sarcastic but, yeah, we were passing through the alley, found the bullet hole, wondered if it was connected to the other incident...but then we were thinking, you know, naaaaah.

But in regard to the way earlier incident, six years ago, tell me EVERYTHING.