Life changed after drive-by shooting

CBH Columbia Basin Herald Local News

by Rodney Hardwood & Staff Writer
| August 18, 2016 1:55 PM

Life as I know it changed on Saturday night after someone drove down my street and tried to kill my neighbors.

I could fill the rest of the paper for the next couple of weeks with names of neighborhoods in cities where shots fired is a nightly occurrence, but this was a little too close to home, literally. It tends to take on a new meaning when responding law enforcement use the tree in your front yard for the yellow police line to secure the crime scene.

Television is saturated with cop shows, some accurate, most flawed in procedure or actuality. I will have to say the gunshots didn’t echo through the night. It was more like an open palm coming down hard on the kitchen counter. What was that? Unlike TV chase scenes, there were no squealing tires or shouts of surprise. Just a loud bang, then the night went silent.

It wasn’t until the street filled with a dozen responding law enforcement vehicles with the blue and reds going that I actually clued into something dreadfully wrong. We were blessed that the coroner wasn’t filling body bags, but a 15-year-old boy caught a bullet in the leg. They called it a non-life threatening injury, but I have to believe every gunshot wound threatens life.

Officers stretched the crime scene tape around the street for half a block and turned the flashlights to the area. It wasn’t until the little cones started popping up in the street marking shell casings that I realized just how bad this thing was. The report would later say bullet holes in the residence and several vehicles were hit, but the eight or nine cones in the street were a stark reality to attempted murder.

Unlike the neighborhood I grew up in where everybody knew everybody, barbecues, going to football games, I don’t know the people around me here in Moses Lake. I drive by that house every day on my way home with a half a dozen cars parked out front, a couple in the front yard like that’s perfectly acceptable. Now I will have to say one of the guys sitting on the front step under police questioning did help me move in. He took the initiative to walk down the street to where I was unloading the UHaul, introduce himself and ask if I wanted some help? He and his brother mowed my lawn the first time until I could get a lawn mower.

But I guess you really don’t know people. You never really know what they’re into. The one thing I do know is that Mattson Drive is not one of those streets you drive by on your way to somewhere else. You have to turn off Stratford Road, drive into the neighborhood with no direct route out. Whoever this was made a premeditated move to drive down my street with the idea of killing someone. A couple of weeks ago a totaled car showed up in front of the house three doors down. It’s hard to believe the city of Moses Lake would allow a car with a shattered windshield, crushed top and trunk to sit on a residential street, but they did. As it turned out, this piece of junk might be the reason they didn’t need body bags instead of an EMT stretcher.

The black, late 1990s Toyota Corolla, as it was later identified, had a limited window of direct sight from the street to the residence coming in from Knolls Vista. By the time it got directly in front of the residence, the crushed car limited to line of sight to the front doorstep where the intended victims sat. Shots had to be aimed high.

As the people came out of their houses to watch CSI Moses Lake, a group of young guys asked me if I lived in the neighborhood. I nodded and said, since February. “This happens in this neighborhood all the time,” one said.

I guess they forgot to mention that in the lease agreement. It’s not like I survived a hail of gunfire or that they were actually shooting at me. But things did change in my perspective on how I view the world in which I live.

Rodney Harwood covers sports and business for the Columbia Basin Herald.