shootouts

These past few days I've been trying to swallow a situation that happened to a few friends and I this weekend. It's been very difficult and caused me to regress a bit, but I'm going to be fine.

Saturday morning I went to the RD2B conference at New England College in New Hampshire. It was a nice conference and I met a bunch of good people. Just after lunchtime, the two other RAs from Hartford and I received a phone call from one of our RDs, informing us of a resident/student death. The resident belonged to one of the other RAs and I didn't know him that well, but it's still sad.

After the long drive back to Hartford, I went out with 3 friends to the Hartford Pour House, a popular bar downtown with great saturday night specials. What made that even better was that it was my name night, which means I got to drink from free from 8pm-last call just for being named 'erica'. How lovely!

So we got to the bar around 11 and stayed until we were kicked out. We drank and danced, but didn't get too crazy. At 2am, we filed out into the crowded streets like everyone else. I looked to my right and pointed out a couple guys fighting about 15 feet from us. Next thing we know, the fighter facing us pulls out a gun and fires three shots. Two into the chest of his opponent and one into the side of the girl standing next to us.

Naturally, there was hysteria in the street as soon as everyone realized someone was shooting. Most of us tried to get back into the bar, but the bar didn't know shots had been fired and was still trying to get people out. Not their fault, but frustrating all the same. One of my friends and I made it back in but realized we were missing our other two friends. We were spotted by an off-duty PS officer who we had seen at the bar earlier that night and had also hung out with briefly, and he grabbed us and pulled us by our wrists out of the bar and ran us back a block. He got us into a cab and sent us back to school safely.

The last we saw of the girl next to us was her feet, as someone dragger her away.

After speaking to the owner of Pour House on Sunday afternoon, I learned that she will be okay, and so will the other guy who was shot. The shooter was arrested and will probably go to jail. Saturday night, after we got back to school, we weren't sure what to do. Nobody was awake and we were all very shaken. I didn't fall asleep until well after the sun came up, and I didn't stay asleep for long.

I'm feeling better about the whole thing now. Much more myself today than I was yesterday.




On a different note, I am home visiting my family for Thanksgiving break. I've only been home for a few hours, but I've noticed that I've had to pull my hands away from my head on numerous counts already. Home is a trigger. How do I combat that?