North Park

Holla,

The saga of Fat Joe will continue at a later date. I was going to continue the blog today, but something extraordinary has happened in my neighborhood. I live in North Park, San Diego. It is a fairly eclectic area of the city. There are homeless people, young professionals, obvious crackheads, families, gang members, and everything other type of person that you can imagine. The major street that runs through North Park is El Cajon Boulevard. It seems that the shadiest activities in the neighborhood occur on El Cajon. You can find nicer homes, stores, and restaurants with each block that you move away from this street.

I live about 5 steps from El Cajon, so I'm in a constant melting pot of shadiness. If I walk down the street to the gas station, I can say hello to our neighbors (a very nice family), give change to a homeless man in the alley, or watch as a drug deal goes down. It makes things very interesting.

So today, I'm sitting in my room with my window open. I can hear the shopping carts of the homeless people pass by my window every couple of hours and the random car alarms going off down the street. Then, in the last hour or so, I've heard a vehicle pass by a couple of times, with someone on a public address system. I can't quite make out what the speaker is saying, but it sounds very official.

In the last couple of minutes, I've heard a helicopter flying overhead, and the PA vehicle drive past again. This is more shady activity than normal, and I started investigating what was happening in the hood. I received an update from my friend that lives a couple of blocks away.

So Greg and I are working from home right now and the cops are going nuts through the hood with the ghetto bird and loud speaker looking for "an armed man in a grey sweatshirt."

The cops are EVERYWHERE....it appears the perimeter includes our block in front of our house....a cop goes by every 30 seconds.

We immediately started firing emails back and forth. There was this report from a San Diego website.

February 13, 2009

Person shot in University Heights

San Diego police are responding to reports of a shooting where at least one person has been wounded in University Heights. The call came in at 9:16 a.m. that a person was shot on El Cajon Boulevard near Texas Street, San Diego police said.

Things were getting crazy. I have been in southern California for almost five months, and I hadn't experienced any shootings. It was about time. Give me a drive-by at least. My friend informed me that there was a collection of 10 policemen with dogs that were searching through the backyard of the house across the street from them. She sent another email.

Well, the cops with canine just came to our house.

Here's the deal....

the coin shop down the street got robbed (armed robbery)...the owner of the shop shot one of the robbers and the other one ran. He jumped into the yard behind the apartment/house complex across the street and dumped his gun/clothes/everything. They are still searching for him...

Armed robbery? Yes! There's money in coin shops. Imagine all of the coins you could steal. they would be worth, like, 8 dollars. Holla! I have a visual of the robbers running away from the coin shop with large bags full of change. They are probably headed to one of those change cashing machines at the bank. That's where the cops should look for them.

Also, the cops apparently found the clothes and gun of the one guy that got away from the shop owner, so now we have a naked coin robber running through the neighborhood somewhere.

I have locked the door to my apartment, but I kind of want to see all of the action. If this is the last post ever, you will know what happened.

Hood out

-Micah