What a way to start your week!

Monday morning. This is the way my morning started.

I was in my bedroom, getting dressed for work, when I heard seven or eight gunshots from a rifle. This is not entirely unusual, as I live on the edge of a canyon where coyotes live and sometimes someone will shoot at the coyotes to get them off of their land. It's not legal, but it happens. In any case, I was a little shaken, but I finished getting ready, grabbed my stuff, and headed off to work. As I made the first turn to get on the main street through our neighborhood, I noticed a SUV parked in front of our local bowling alley, with a homeless man and another man both peering through its windows. It was running and appeared to have red paint splattered on the driver's side, which I thought was odd. I noticed the second man who'd been watching the car take off running for the main road and stop, scanning the main street as though waiting for someone to come by. As I made the turn onto the main street, I saw the first police car come screaming up the road, followed closely by another, then three more. As I pulled to the stop light just before the freeway, a police car came screaming out of the drive through car wash, still soapy, and he headed up the road, too. At this point, I called work and asked one of my team members to check the 'net to see what was going on. All in all, I saw eight police cars and a paramedic unit fly up the hill toward my house.

I'm really pretty shaken. This sort of thing just doesn't happen in my neighborhood. Lots of car break ins, but that's petty stuff and to be expected, frankly, when you live in a large city like San Diego. Our neighborhood is lots of apartments, condos, and one very large senior living complex. It's quiet and there are lots of military - active and retired - throughout the neighborhood, so we don't have gang activity, either. What scares me the most is that this appears to be totally random, just some poor 60 year old man, minding his own business and driving through our canyon on a Monday morning. If that's the case, who's to say that it won't happen again? This isn't some remote part of the county, either, it's no more than 15 miles from downtown and very heavily populated. At the risk of sounding like my grandfather, what is this world coming to?

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