It's 9pm on Christmas eve, dumping rain in our neighborhood and I just got one of the weirdest calls of my life. (some mentions of violence below)
It has been a particularly violent year on our block with many women getting attacked within 50ft of our apartment throughout the year. I helped two of them after their attacks, but they told me not to call the cops for fear their attackers would hurt them even more.
About a year ago we heard a scream early in the morning. When I came down, we found a woman had been stabbed right in front of our door. Our downstairs neighbor was already helping her when I arrived, so I called 911 and grabbed some towels.
The woman who had been stabbed didn't even realize it at the time. She had thought she had just been hit really hard, but there was blood all over our sidewalk. We had often wondered what happened to her after the ambulance took her away.
Fast forward to tonight, when I got a strange call from someone trying random numbers on our apartment buzzer. It was the woman who had been stabbed last January. She was hoping to find the man, our neighbor, who had held her while she was suffering. She wanted to say thanks.
I wasn't home, so I couldn't buzz her in, but I told her another buzzer number to try to reach the neighbor at. I'm hoping they were able to connect. She said the man who stabbed her was in jail. Christine and I were just happy to hear she was alive and well after that night.
Quick update: I knocked on my neighbor's door and passed the message on to him. He was traveling yesterday, so missed the woman, but I told her she's doing fine and her attacker had been arrested. He seemed happy to find out, but I wish he could have heard it from her.
