Last night my next-door neighbor Mr. Brown, a 70-year-old man, went out for a smoke. Three teenage boys had been hanging around our apartment building, sitting on the entrance doorstep of our senior citizens apartment building on Good Hope Road SE. When they asked Mr. Brown for a cigarette, he said he didn’t have any extras. They hit him on the back of the head. Mr. Brown came upstairs with blood all over his head and hands while the rest of us were watching Dallas play the Giants.
The ambulance took Mr. Brown to the hospital, and the police came to our apartment building, but the boys are still at large.
What is wrong with young people today? Many of them are good kids, but many have no respect for their elders, or for anyone else…
Last year while I was staying at the men’s shelter 801-E on Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue in Southeast DC, I was talking to one of my friends. He got up from the bench to go inside, and I continued reading the newspaper. I heard some boys laughing and running down the street. A few minutes later I got up to go inside the shelter, and saw my friend lying on the sidewalk, unconscious, with blood dripping from his mouth….
A couple weeks ago a family man in his 20s was walking home from a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue after the baseball game, and he was brutally attacked and hit on the head with a hammer…he almost died, and will need therapy for a long time….
We need to do something to stop these vicious street crimes in our city. It is time to start Neighborhood Watch groups all over DC.
