The central public library in Lawrence, KS is very nice. That’s expected; the town’s a liberal-academic oasis. The library is just one block off Massachusetts Street, which is our main street. This location is also convenient to two large homeless encampments. Many of the hundreds of people living rough in Lawrence spend a good part of the day in or around the library, which has a stated policy of treating the homeless population with compassion. I guess it’s come to this: lending books is one thing libraries still do but they’ve diversified to provide clean water, bathrooms, comfy seating, and heat in winter and air conditioning in summer for people with nowhere else to be.
I’m not sure what the homeless cohort is like when inside; maybe they’re quiet. But outside the library there’s always a few people in various states of mental distress engaged in generally internecine yelling and low-key aggression.
This behavior extends to the other side of the street, especially around a small bus shelter. I’ve heard many people say that they avoid the library because the street scene makes them uncomfortable. It’s not that I feel physically threatened by Lawrence’s homeless, but if it wasn’t for the fact that Climb Lawrence (my gym) is located directly across the street from the library, I’d avoid that block. As it is, I’m always a bit on alert when approaching it, which I do every couple of days. There’s a sign on the door: “Bathrooms are for members only”, but they allow some street people to use them. Once inside, I let my guard down; it’s a “safe space” for me (as the youngs would say).
Last Wednesday, as I rode up and pushed my bicycle inside, there was some aggressive yelling coming from the bus shelter. That’s common enough that I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Maybe I should have.
As its name implies, Climb Lawrence is a climbing gym. I, however, usually only use the little weight room. It has two windows looking out onto the library. On sunny afternoons they close those blinds. There’s also a window in the side wall that looks right out onto the bus shelter.
The bus shelter is a rectangular structure open to the street. It looks like glass, but must be made of something unbreakable. It’s transparent but hazy and in the afternoon when the light’s hitting it a certain way, appears frosted. There were two or three people around the shelter and two or three in it; I saw the ones in there as shapes.
The yelling I heard on the way in continued to ebb and flow. In terms of volume and intensity, it was within a couple of standard deviations of normal for that spot. Inside the concrete-block building and behind a closed, double-glazed window the sound was somewhat muted and I wasn’t that interested in trying to decipher what was being said if it was even coherent.
I’ve heard similar disturbances out there dozens of times. No one familiar with that spot would consider phoning the cops over such a scene; they’d be crying “Wolf!” multiple times a day and lucky to get an eyeroll emoji in response.
Some time into my warmup, the duration and intensity of the shouting outside made me just curious enough to step over the window for a closer look at the shouter. He was African-American whereas most of Lawrence’s homeless population is white but otherwise nondescript. If a casting director, wardrobe supervisor, and hair & makeup person had to prepare an actor for a role as a street person, they could’a used him as a model.
He was standing on the curb in front of the shelter. I thought he was yelling at someone in the shelter but I wasn’t sure of that because I didn’t have clear view into the shelter. Anyway, my attention was focused on the axis defined by the yelling guy and the shelter.
I did not register anything like an exchange of specific threats. No, “I’ve got a gun, muthafucka” or anything like that. No one approached the yeller from the shelter and he didn’t move off the curb in those few seconds.
I was looking right at the guy when I heard three shots in rapid succession and he fell to the ground. It was not theatrical at all; he dropped as if he’d been a marionette and someone had suddenly cut all the strings. The shots sounded very close and I assumed they’d come from the shelter. I momentarily ducked, suddenly appreciative of the building’s concrete walls. The bottom of the window was at my chest level so I just had to crouch, not dive, for cover.
After a few seconds of conspicuous silence I peeked above the parapet.
Guy, motionless, on the ground.
It seemed odd to me that there was no evident panic or even much concern at the bus shelter. Everyone who’d been in or around it seemed just to drift away. The way they moved made me think they wanted to get the fuck outta there but do so in the least conspicuous manner, except for one guy who strode out of the shelter, almost stepping over the victim and getting well into the street before turning to look down at him with an expression I read as disdain. Meanwhile, a couple of other people drifted over from across the street. My guess is that all of that happened within a minute or two.
I had my phone with me but for some reason I poked my head out of the weight room and told the 20-something girl at the counter to call 911. She did, and it rang for at least a couple of minutes before I heard her report a shooting.
By then, a couple of people who’d come over from the front of the library were crouching by the guy and saying things like, “Talk to me, man” and “You gotta move.” Those things weren’t going to happen. The only obviously emotional response came when someone yelled something about why was it taking so long for an ambulance to arrive when the fire department was right down the block. That was a good question. I obviously could have exited the building to offer aid, though having seen him fall… I knew there was nothing to do. I’m not proud of this, but I also wanted to keep my claim to the squat rack as there were two other young guys in the weight room who I thought might take it over.
After what seemed like a long time, cops arrived. The first car stopped so far away down the block that I wondered whether there’d been another shooting down there or whether an unintended target was also involved. The first cops to the shelter shoved the bystanders away and one started chest compressions. That was hopeless but at least they didn’t just stand around. (In case you’re wondering: Yes, I do realize that “standing around” is exactly what I was doing.)
Then an ambulance showed up and those guys took over. They put some kind of respirator on the victim. Defibrillator; no joy. After a good few minutes of people performing chest compressions, they rigged up an automatic device that kept trying. Maybe ten minutes later—by then I was back to doing my squat sets—the ambulance guys put a sheet over the victim.
FWIW I stepped out, called a cop over; told him what I’d seen and gave him my name and number.
They closed the gym early, so I was unable to finish my workout after all.
A word to older readers: Youngs these days don’t really get gallows humor.
Per subsequent reporting: The victim, Vincent Lee Walker, 39, had been involved in an altercation with another man who walked away, returned on a bicycle, fired three shots, and pedaled away. Later that day, a man matching the description of the suspect accidentally dropped a gun inside a Lawrence homeless shelter. He ran out but was arrested. Police charged Nicholas Beaver with second-degree murder.
One thing this experience taught me is that I am a shit witness. At the time, I did not register a bicyclist at all. As noted, I assumed Walker was yelling at the people in the bus shelter, so I was focused on an axis defined by him and the people I could see in the shelter nearest to him; I wasn’t paying much attention to the axis of the street, at a right angle. I would be disappointed to learn that I failed to see the bicyclist just because I hadn’t expected him—as if he’d been that guy in the gorilla suit walking through the basketball game. In the limited defense of my observational skills, it’s possible that the bicyclist had not been in my field of view; if he approached from the north he might’ve been concealed by the wall protecting me and if he’d come from the south, at least partially concealed by the backlit shelter. I suppose that my perception of the sound as having come from within the shelter could just have been an artifact of window vs wall for sound transmission or an echo off another nearby building. Or just a misperception.
A lesson, FWIW: Open up your peripheral vision and remain alert to secondary threats. Obviously, a guy incoherently and aggressively shouting deserves attention, but not all your attention.
I’m still processing it, but my overwhelming first impression is of the banality of the murder. Considering that dozens of people saw Walker murdered in cold blood—including, I presume, some people who knew him—there was remarkably little outcry and no panic. (Was it technically cold blood? Walker’s blood was boiling but Beaver had left the scene and returned with obvious intent to kill; I’m a bit baffled as to why the cops and local DA didn’t file first-degree charges.)
If most of the bystanders saw Beaver ride away on his bicycle, there’d be no reason for them to feel personally threatened so they’d have no reason to run or seek cover. But there wasn’t much of any response; maybe they thought Walker got what was coming to him. I got no sense that the people standing around outside realized that in a slightly different universe it’d’ve been them under that sheet. Even the kids in the climbing gym who come from a completely different social stratum appeared nonplussed. Inside and out, the vibe I got was just, “OK, this is what’s happening now.”
From my perspective, the murder was unexpected but unsurprising. What I mean by that is that it was more or less commotion-as-usual out there. I expected it to end with him shouting himself out and shuffling off or at most taking a punch to the face. I didn’t expect gunshots and a sudden death just outside the window.
But I wasn’t surprised, either. How could I be, in a town with hundreds of desperate addicts and alcoholics—many or most with mental health problems—left to govern their own encampments in a state and nation where guns outnumber people? For no instant did I think, “Holy shit, a gun! ”
The most troubling aspect of the aftermath, for me, has been coming to terms with the fact that I was not particularly troubled. A good friend was aghast when I told her, “He went down like a sack of shit;” admittedly crude verbal shorthand conveying my certainty that the victim had been instantly killed.
“He was a human being,” she said. “He probably had a mother that loved him.”
True dat. I am ashamed of myself. I think I would have felt quite differently if Walker had shown any flicker of consciousness after being shot. Or I may be too rational; fifty people are shot and killed every day in the U.S. You may hate that, but as a nation, America has decided it’s OK. I agonized over the murder I happened to see on that particular Wednesday only about as much as I agonized over the plus-or-minus 49 murders I didn’t see. Or have I somehow become a sociopath?
I haven’t lived in Canada for about 25 years but I still have friends up there. I texted a couple of them and said, “I guess I’m a real American now.”
