What's Wrong With This Picture?

So after my trip to Henderson to get video of the schmuck I will lovingly refer to as 'Bad Santa' ((see previous post)) I returned to my station, video in hand only to hear:

Dispatch: Rescue 83, copy a 27 Echo 1...

A 27 is a gunshot wound, and an 'echo' severity tag on it means that it's obviously fatal. Medical still has to respond and pronounce the person 'officially' dead.

I missed the PD dispatch, so I didn't hear what the circumstances were. It was in an apartment complex in 'Old Henderson', the area where Henderson first started - which is obviously why it's older than new Henderson.

Anyway, I fly away - from the station which is MUCH farther away this time - and arrive about 20 minutes later. Outside of the building I see a few police trucks and nothing else.

I try my damnedest to get Henderson's attention, but getting any information out of Henderson PD is like trying to squeeze orange juice from a tomato. I shoot the scene, and stand around waiting for someone to come and talk to me.

My pleas of 'SIR!' and 'EXCUSE ME, SERGANT?' go unheeded and I sigh. Just an hour ago we were all yucking it up together. I swear that HPD is bi-polar.

Finally a pair of detectives and CSI's arrive. The detectives both ignore me and go inside. Not 120 seconds later they come back out, get into their cars and leave.

Normally this would befuddle a person, but not me. I use my master journalistic skills of reasoning and deduction to declare this shooting a suicide. How do I figure that? Well obviously everyone wouldn't be leaving if it was a homicide. Have you seen how many cops stand around yakking at a homicide?

I sigh and complain that HPD didn't come and tell me this an hour ago - I'm sure they were all bitching that I was there, not understanding that the news won't cover most suicides and if they would have told me what it was I would have scrammed. But as I was walking back to my car I look around.

Old Henderson, the area around Pacific Ave, Water Street, Atlantic Ave, is a lower to low-mid income area. I've been here several times, not because low income people commit crimes, but because people who commit crimes usually live in low income areas. I've talked to the residents in this neighborhood and I have yet to meet one who wasn't the nicest person I've ever met.

Anyway most of the houses are small, kind of shabby... To be perfectly blunt, a lot of them are shacks.

This is the 'apartment complex' where the suicide occurred. It is right next door to what I will be later comparing it too.

This is the house next to it, who's lawn I used to plead for information and gather video. A lot of the houses look similar to this, sans the boarded up windows.

Now I am not showing you these pictures to tease these people. I have been there. You should see the houses my mom had back on 20th Street and Reynolds Ave in Springfield. There was carpet in the kitchen for crying out loud.

No, I am showing you this as a comparison. In the middle of these houses, with the shacks and single bedroom huts surrounding it, was this:


Now that is about as out of place as me at a 50 Cent show. I am DYING to know if this was some sort of urban revitalization plan that went horribly awry. I want to know if the people who live there are looked down upon (or up upon, depending on which floor they reside on) by the other residents in the neighborhood.

I, for the life of me, cannot understand, see nor phantom how THAT beautiful apartment building ended up in the middle of Old Henderson. Usually when you plant a rose you tear down the weeds!

I think that the City of Henderson is contributing to the poor self esteem of the residents of Old Henderson and that they should either ghetto up that apartment complex or build new, nice, stable homes for the other people there. It's not fair and I know if I lived down there I would pee on that building daily.