Theresa Lewis

Sometimes, I see things that others don’t see. I’m not talking about seeing ghosts. I’m talking about everyday life with real live people here.

At the time, I was living in an apartment on the second floor of a large building in town. As I faced the living room window, there was a two story duplex across the street in front of our apartment building. To the right was a street that intersected the base of our street; kind of like a T. Along the side of the street, there was a chain link fence that ran for miles. On the other side of the fence were train tracks.

One lovely summer afternoon, I was watching television with my husband. Our television was on a floor stand right in front the living room window.

As I was watching the show, I was distracted by a man running across the duplex rooftop. I pointed it out to my husband and I asked him what he thought the man was up to. We watched him sit on the edge of the roof for a few moments. The man swung down by one arm like a monkey and dropped onto the top balcony. The next thing I knew, the man had entered the house.

I didn’t know who lived there, except that I had seen a man in a pilot’s uniform come and go from that house. I knew the man who normally lived there, was not home that weekend because I had seen him leave with his luggage on Friday night. The man I was watching had no business being there. I immediately called the police and reported the incident.

I was told to stay on the phone with dispatch until the police arrived. Mere moments before the police showed up, the bandit jumped over the railing and plummeted to the ground below. I was giving dispatch a running commentary as things were unfolding. I gave the physical description; white man, early twenties, red tee-shirt, beige slacks, white sneakers. I even told dispatch which direction he had run to make his escape.

Suddenly, four squad cars pulled up to a screeching halt, the doors flew open and chaos exploded in the street. I hung up with dispatch and went out on my balcony to assist, if I could.

I told the cops which direction the guy went, but as I was trying to explain, a young black man rounded the corner and four officers jumped him and slammed him into the tree on the lawn then forced him face down onto the ground. They cuffed the guy then dragged him to his feet. The officers wrenched his arms up behind his back so hard that the poor fellow couldn’t even stand up straight. I gasped in horror.

I was glad my mother wasn’t around to witness this because I felt like a fish-wife as I bellowed to the cops on the street below that they had the wrong man. The cops looked puzzled. I yelled that the man they were looking for was a white guy. Immediately, two officers took off running. One officer scaled the chain link fence like an athlete and both ran in the direction I told them to; one on either side of the fence.

Meanwhile, the other two officers were still holding onto the black man they had just roughed up. I don’t know why the officers didn’t immediately release him when they knew they had the wrong man, but they didn’t.

When the black man turned around, I saw that he had wet his pants. I felt embarrassed for him. I can’t imagine what went through that poor man’s head. Here, he had just been casually strolling along on a sunny afternoon, when out of the blue, he gets jumped by four police officers, slammed into a tree then hammered face first into the ground and cuffed and he had no idea why. It was obvious that they had scared the piss out of him.

About five minutes later the other two cops that had taken off after the real culprit, returned with the bandit in cuffs. The black man saw why he had been mistaken for the white guy.

It just so happened that the black man was wearing a red tee-shirt, beige pants and white sneakers. It was almost too funny to watch the officers trying to pacify the black man. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I saw them shake hands with the black man. The next thing I saw was the black man getting into the back of one of the police cars. No doubt he had talked the officer into giving him a lift home so he could change his pants.

The End