Criminal Incident

We had some drama last night, on our last night in the Bay area. I took the kids for a walk along a public shoreline in the nice, quiet, clean, respectable-looking area behind our hotel (yep, hotel, ouch--all camping was full for Memorial Day weekend) and as we crossed a street, Miss Banana suddenly started screaming and clutching her leg. I heard a crack right at the same time, and I wondered if she could possibly have brittle bones or something truly weird like that.

She was bawling and clutching the back of her thigh. She said she didn't know what it was, but it was way worse than a bee. We had a look, and she had a welt with broken skin. Peter said, "That sounded like a pellet gun."

I went back to the hotel and told Dave. I didn't have street names or much of any coherent explanation. He went out to check out where it had happened, and sure enough, someone took a shot at the car and dinged the door.

There was a lady on the street, and Dave stopped and asked her if she'd heard anything. She said she thought she heard rustling in the bushes, but that it was a deer. The way Dave's mind works, in about a tenth of a second he'd run through how much power that air rifle would have to hit the car with that force at that distance, and the fact that someone aimed that at his child.

He ran into the shrubbery to see if he could spot anything. (There is one of the key differences between a man's reaction to his child harmed and a woman's.) He didn't find anyone. On the upside, it's a pretty interesting life lesson for a pre-teen girl to experience being defended by a man who genuinely, deeply loves her. Some example for those upcoming boyfriends to live up to.

Dave called the Mill Valley police (while I warned Tiger Lily not to wax melodramatic while Daddy is on the phone), and they showed up within 10 minutes. We were pretty amazed. (Mill Valley is across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, north of Sausalito, and nothing like urban SF.) The officer was very gentle and brief in front of the kids, but he and Dave talked more when they went to look at the car. By the time Dave came back to the room, they'd already begun searching and questioning door to door.

About 11:30, there was a knock on our door again, and the watch commander had come in person to tell us that they'd caught and arrested the guy and he was on his way to jail. Apparently we'd crossed paths with one of those brilliant criminal masterminds. The idiot walked into the police while they were canvassing for him.

Do not pass "Go"...Do not collect your IQ score.

The pellet hadn't penetrated, just broken the skin and left a welt, so we didn't need to get medical attention. Miss Banana's wound was no worse than a mosquito bite by morning. I slept far worse than she did, worrying about it. She had it on ice and took ibuprofen before she went to bed, and was thrilled to hear that it was safe to go out again when she woke up.

Lily, on the other hand, has had to be forbidden from voicing wild flights of morbidness over the darker possibilities that didn't happen. It's been interesting watching her try to fit logical boundaries around something that's inconceivable to her. The little ones were stunned that anyone would do that to another person, and it really, really bothered them until we gave them a variety of reasons that people might make up to tell themselves why they should do such a bad thing.

After that, they were content to go back to fighting amongst themselves for the rest of the day-long drive out to Nevada.

Sigh.

Oh, well, Miss Banana can now tell the world she got shot in San Francisco.

Update: On June 15, we received a phone call from our criminal genius's probation officer. His defense to police was, "I was shooting at birds and kept missing." Yep, as brilliant and devious as we suspected. He spent 25 days incarcerated, received a community service sentence, and is required to report to his PO before and after school every day.

My only disappointment is that sometime within the next 12 months, the record of this will be sealed. I hope he learns from it.

In the meantime, we explained community service to Miss Banana, and she chuckled. "I think he should have to clean up dog poop."