Tuesday, April 5, 2011

day #16

SCARIEST MOMENT

This one's a doozie. I swear everything about this story I'm about to tell you is 100% true.  Perhaps now you'll understand part of the fear in my life.

In 2003 I was living with my aunt and uncle.  I was a sophomore in college.  It was a Saturday night late fall, and I had been out to a movie with friends.  I pulled up at the house around 1:30am, which was unusually late for me.  I lived with them for 2 years, and I always always parked in the street in front of their house.  For whatever reason, I chose to park in the driveway this time.  It was chilly out, so I got out of my car quickly and ran inside through the front door.  I had been in the house 30 seconds or so, when I remembered I had left my cell phone in my car.  I went back out the front door and took two quick steps to the west, toward my car in the driveway.  Then I heard the rustle in the leaves behind me.

You know how thoughts can run through your brain really fast in moments when the hair on the back of your neck stands on end?  All in a split second, I considered the possibilities of the noise I heard behind me.  First thought was a neighborhood dog.  I didn't want to get biten, or chased by some dog I didn't know.  Second thought was some kind of possum, as I had seen one in the back yard months back.  I turned back to the East to see what it was I should be running from.  And there he was.  A man, approximately 5'9", dressed in all black, including a ski mask, with a black backpack over his left shoulder.  He had been standing in front of my bedroom window, and when I bounced out of the house, it must have startled him.  By the time I whirled around to see what the noise was, he was on his way around the East corner of the house, around my bedroom.

I had NO time to decide what to do.  I either had to run AWAY from him, toward my car, or TOWARD him and go inside and wake up my uncle.  I ran into the house, locked the door and woke up Joel.  I told him there was a masked guy in the front yard outside my window.  Joel, like any father figure would do, got a flashlight and went after him while I called the police

Joel didn't see anything unusual when he went outside.  The police came and we filled out a report about what had happened.  They also searched our street and found nothing.  That was that, and I didn't see that man again, until Christmastime

My aunt and uncle went out of town to visit my aunt's family for Christmas, and left me home alone for a few days.  I was bored one evening and asked my mom to come over and watch TV with me.  She was sitting in the living room and I walked past the entry way and the man was standing on the front porch in his ski mask, with his flashlight up against the front door, looking inside.  I freaked out completely.  Mom and I made sure all the doors were locked and we called the police again.  When they got there, of course they found nothing suspicious around the house or on our street. 

By this time I'm certainly nervous coming and going, especially at night.  The police questioned me quite a bit, since I was the only person that had seen this guy. (I thought they thought I was going crazy and just seeing things!)  I'd often call my uncle before I pulled up to the house and he'd stand outside and watch me pull up and walk in.  I never saw anything suspicious again.

One day a couple months later I was driving home from work and my aunt called me.  She told me there was police at the end of the street, but I needed to go home and go inside and stay there til she came home.  Apparently it had been an eventful day.

Two doors down, we had neighbors, a sweet family of four.  The two children were young, grade school aged, and had complained of seeing someone outside their bathroom window.  The father, Scott, was concerned, and installed a silent alarm.  Basically, if there was motion outside the windows, it would notify him inside the house silently with a light.  During the kids' bathtime that evening, the little alarm light came on.  So he went outside quietly, and found the man in the ski mask, with the backpack, standing outside the window.  Scott chased him down the street about the same time my aunt had come home, so she joined in the chase as well.  Our neighbor and my aunt tackled him in the culdesac and waiting for police. When the police got there, they removed his ski mask. It was the man that lived next door.  (The house between us and Scott's family.)

...Oh it gets worse.

Throughout the following weeks I was interviewed by the detective that was assigned to our case, as was our neighbor two doors down who helped catch the creep.  Detective Day worked and worked to piece together the puzzle, including researching the creep's computer and finding pictures taken through bedroom windows, child pornography, etc.  Sometime during the following weeks, he remembered that the night my aunt and Scott tackled his guy, he was dressed in all black, but he was barefoot.  This triggered a memory of a case he had worked on two streets over, 18 years before, where a man in all black, a ski mask (barefoot) with a black backpack had broken into a woman's bedroom window, tied her up and raped her.  When her husband came home and walked in on it, the creep stabbed the husband to death infront of the woman, and left her there.  He got away.   The mystery was never solved, until my case surfaced, and they matched a muddy footprint from 2004, with a bloody footprint from 1986.

Just to clarify, Jonathan Graham, our next door neighbor, had knives and ducktape in his backpack, standing outside my window that day in the fall of 2003. This is the same man who was outside most mornings when I left for school, that would wave a friendly hello, or say "Good morning!" just like any other nice neighbor would.  Now, he's in prison for life.


Document from 1986 murder/rape

News story from 2004

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