"It's Crazy How Used To This S*** You Can Become" On Penn Ave. N. Tonight...

Afghan sewage truck leaking sewage, COP Arian, Afghanistan, blog post by John Hoff


Because I happened to hear about it on Facebook, an incident that happened tonight on the 2600 block of Penn Ave. N. will be immortalized here in the blogosphere even though nobody was killed by gunfire. Here is what happened according to an account by Penn Ave. N. resident Jeff Skrenes, as posted on Facebook...


Today at around 8:00, (p.m.) I heard yelling outside my window, followed by a series of gunshots. It was the first time I've even HEARD gunshots while in my new home, and the first time they were so close they made me dive for the floor. I saw a red sedan-style car drive off, but I don't know if they fired the shots or merely stopped because of them and then fled the scene. A green four-dour (sic) car was the target of these shots and the vehicle was hit several times.

Thankfully no one in the car was hit by the gunshots, but in their attempt to flee the scene, they collided with a fire hydrant on the southwest corner of Penn and 26th. I ran outside, yelling for the nearby bus driver to call 911 as I did so myself. The police got there within moments.


From what I overheard witnesses telling the police, apparently the occupants of each car were sitting at the intersection flashing gang signs at each other, and then the other vehicle pulled out a gun and started firing. The driver or front passenger of the victims' car sustained injuries from glass and from the collision, but no one else appeared to have been seriously hurt.


What I found more disturbing than the shots themselves was what seemed to be an overall reluctance to tell the cops much of anything. It seems that these people are just going to go back to their own cliques and get more people and more guns and fire more bullets. And that is the outrage here.

North Minneapolis resident Brian Finstad was also on Penn Ave. N. tonight and wrote the following account on Facebook.

Talk about desensitization . . . I went to a friend's house tonight and arrived just after a shoot out occurred between two vehicles right in front of his house. There were cops everywhere. An ambulance. One vehicle with busted out windows crashed up on the curb, taking out a fire hydrant. One bloody guy walking around.

Then after all of that wraps up clears out, we sit on the porch for the evening. After a couple of hours, I made the comment (with all sincerity), "Welp, (sic) looks like it's been a pretty quiet night around here." My friend had to remind me about what had happened earlier. After a couple hours of quiet, I had already forgotten and had put that out of my mind. I then responded "Oh yeah - except for THAT." 


It is crazy how used to this shit you can become.


In further Facebook conversation that followed, it was established that nobody was observed to be arrested but bullets ended up "everywhere in the barricades where they blocked off the west side of 26th for the construction." Jeff Skrenes commented on the location of two cameras in the area and hoped aloud good footage was captured.

In what I will consider a "wrap it all up" editorial comment on this incident, Jeff wrote:

I expected to have some experiences like this given the intersection. But that's kind of the point, isn't it? That somehow we all tolerate this kind of activity as long as it happens away from us. And when someone like me buys a house in the middle of it, then people say "Well, what did you EXPECT?"

As if the decent, law-abiding folk are the problem.