Musings of an Aging Nobody

Under cover of the darkness, the intruder slipped silently at first into the garage of the suburban residence; confident that in the early morning hours of around 3:30 am, the residents of the home would be fast asleep.

Inside the home, Deputy Easton McDonald was already up and preparing to go to work that day in his position with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department.

The intruder was apparently unaware that an alarm had been set off alerting Deputy McDonald inside, that the garage door had been breached.  He knew someone, at that moment, was in his garage.

Now hearing noises the Deputy retrieved a weapon.

The shadowy figure, in the darkness, continued to move through the garage not knowing that the Deputy was now on the alert and had a weapon.

Who was this perpetrator?

Was this person armed and dangerous?

Was the motive a break in with the intent to rob the residents?

Or maybe worse?

And what was going through Deputy McDonald’s mind as this dark shadow moved through his garage?

An intruder was in his home, his loved ones upstairs asleep.

Yes, a trained professional, but his wife; his family upstairs and asleep are now in danger. Who knows how much adrenaline was kicking in at this moment.

Now when he sees the dark figure coming at him he fires his gun.

“I am studying how quickly you react to something that is frightening, and it turns out that it takes just a tenth of a second between the time you are exposed to something that you fear until you react,” says Ole Åsli, a postdoc in the Department of Psychology at the University of Tromsø, in the ScienceNordic.

This has been a hard week for our country, for the African-American community, and for our police officers.  Again this week these incidents involved white police officers and African-Americans resulting in the loss of lives, maybe innocent lives.  Who can say?

From the vantage point of my TV,  I am not deciding right or wrong.

But I do know some police officers, or former police officers.  And I know their wives and their children.  And I am sure they were always as anxious as any one of us to be able to go home safely to their loved ones after facing stressful situation after stressful situation every shift.

And in those horrific moments of fear, those moments of fight or flight, when decisions had to be made in tenths of a second, reactions couldn’t be changed once committed.  They weren’t allowed a second chance; a second or third “take” if the outcome is not what was wanted unlike the movies or television where way too many of us base our version of reality these days.  It doesn’t happen that way in real life, you can’t take it back.

You don’t get a do over.

And what about Deputy McDonald, the police officer who shot the intruder in his garage?

Did we read in the Washington Post the next day about another white police officer shooting an unarmed person, maybe an unarmed African-American person?

No we didn’t.

In the case of Deputy McDonald, yes the victim was unarmed.  And the victim was white.

In fact the person Deputy McDonald shot in his garage as he felt he was being threatened, was his teenage daughter trying to sneak back into the house early that morning after slipping out of the house the prior evening.

We can be sure Deputy McDonald wishes he could take that split second reaction back.

Thankfully, his daughter survived her gun shot wound.

I don’t know…

I am sad for all involved… for all of us.

Somehow,  some way,  we need to change something.

Maybe we just need to pray about it.