Welcome To What You Didn’t Expect

You go out into a public place thinking everything is safe and sometimes get a big surprise..

Last night we headed out to the local Wal-Mart to do a bit of out of town shopping picking up supplies for our return trip home, we got the usual greeting as we entered the front door “Welcome to Wal-Mart” to which we gathered our basket and began our shopping experience, making our way back and forth finding absolutely nothing we were looking for and a whole lot more.

Half way through the Men’s clothes, Greeting Cards, and baby formula we heard the banging and crashing noises of what sounded like a fist fight going on, the sound of things falling off of the shelves and the screams of women continued to move closer and closer to us, when we turned the corner and saw the large pool of blood on the floor the hair stood on the back of my neck, there was a trail leading away towards the door and the noise of the fight followed the trail of blood out the door, there were firefighters at the door accepting donations and they are the ones who stopped the fight in it’s path, I am assuming this due to the number of police cars that ended up parked right there with a man handcuffed in the back seat and the pool of blood next to a blood soaked shirt piled next to where these firefighters were standing when we first arrived.

The local paper today tells the story of a stabbing back on the fourth of July in which the victim refused to cooperate with the investigation, the stabbing that we ended up way too close to included the same victim and also the same suspect from the previous incident in July, it seems they bumped into each other at Wal-Mart and words were exchanged with the same man being stabbed once again, I wonder if he will again refuse to cooperate? I also wonder why the paper appears to sugar coat what happened in their story Holiday Stabbing Spills Over At Store by saying that the incident was between two groups rather than mention the word Gang, I suppose if you use the word gang then it just may scare folks, not that seeing this amount of blood on the floor and hearing those sounds in a place that is supposed to be safe hasn’t already scared the pants off of a whole lot of people. I guess if you insinuate a gang incident whether it was one or not then the fear escalates and more papers are sold.

At any rate these type of things are happening everywhere now sad to say, we are used to seeing this type of thing happening in the larger cities or somewhere we have never been, it’s really sad to be pushing a basket with your wife and a small child who wanted to go shopping with you and be faced with something that should not be happening this close to you, on our way out the door we saw no greeters welcoming people, instead there was a lot of crime tape and police officers blocking the aisles, the look of shock on the faces of the workers was probably only matched by the same look on the faces of Cindy and I.

Getting back to California is looking pretty good about now.