The First Time You Witness Murder Is The Hardest

To this day, I cannot repress, suppress or otherwise erase the image of the first man I ever saw die. Even now my mind performs an odd ritual of vivisection. I can still see the pool of blood. I still remember his hand coming up in a hopeless manner. The life that was still in his eyes was bleeding out in a rapid fashion. There was nothing anyone could have done for him.

There I was in my Sunday best, my shirt was pressed and my pants creased to perfection. I remember my family was on our way to church. We used to live about four blocks away from the church, and we would walk because my father always hated that post-church traffic. The irony is lost on most people, but it was hell getting out of God’s house. Besides my father always had this irrational fear about having his car battery stolen; it happened to a friend of his once, and he always carried on with a fear that he would be next.

We used to cut across the park in order to skip a very lazy traffic light. It was always my mother, my father, and my sister attempting to make the noon services at Dolores Mission. At first we made nothing of it. There were always arguments at the park – especially when it came to sporting exhibitions. Whenever you have two or more men with a ball between them, you will have trouble. There was a group of six or seven men by the basketball courts, pushing and shoving each other over the outcome of a play. That was nothing new. In fact, all my father did was put his body between us and the action – and what followed made an impression on me.

One of the men grabbed his basketball and decided to go home. The other group began to belittle him and question his manhood. This led to more pushing and shoving, and eventually people started throwing punches. A young wiry man that kind of looked like Billy Crudup in “Almost Famous,” took off his shirt and balled it up around his fist. He then reached around and blindsided one of the participants with a punch. The punch landed and left the other man stutter-stepping.

It was then when one of his friends reached into his back pocket, retrieved something and plunged it into the chest of the Billy Crudup-looking guy. Then I remember everyone running in different directions. The man on the floor twisted up into severed pretzel shapes as he let out savage animal moans. My father yelled at some folks hanging out at their porch to call an ambulance. It took them a while to react, but they finally did. My mother grabbed my hand and told me not to look back — even though I did. The look on his face, the arching of his back, and the sliding around in his own blood and the futility of his actions were burned into my memory.

We slinked away to the church. I remember hearing the sirens as they interrupted the priest’s sermon about something pious that would have served as a life lesson. By the time the second collection rolled around, the gossiping whisper wave had made its way to the middle: the young man did not make it. By the time the ambulance made it, all they could really do was place a long, white sheet over his body.

After church was over, we decided to wait out the lazy light. The dried out puddle of blood was there the following week. That’s all it took for me to realize that things would never be the same. I would see puddles of dried blood like that in the street after an argument went south or in a driveway in the aftermath of doing what cannot be undone – but nothing ever prepares you for the first puddle.