Forty-three years ago this week, in March 1964, a young woman named Kitty Genovese arrived at her apartment in the wee hours of the morning after a long night of working as a manager at a local bar. As she walked the 100 feet from her car to her apartment, a man appeared out of the shadows and stabbed her twice in the back. She cried out for help, and the man fled. Over the course of the next half hour, as Genovese continued to cry out for help, the man returned and murdered the barely conscious young woman. During the attack, dozens of neighbors heard her pleas and failed to so much as call the police.
Over the next few weeks, media coverage of Genovese's murder exploded as America lamented the apparent hard-heartedness of its citizens. One of the silent witnesses to the attack summed up her lack of action by telling a reporter that she just "didn't want to get involved." Kitty's legacy has served as a cautionary tale for people worldwide about the dangers of apathy.
As tragic as Genovese's death was, her untimely death has fueled a disturbing development in modern times - profoundly stupid men doing profoundly stupid things in an attempt to play the hero as they stupidly try to stop what they think is a rape in progress. These men mean well, but they're not terribly bright. They're the kind of people who have worn through at least two copies of "The Boondock Saints" on DVD and who read police blotters thinking "I could have prevented this from taking place, if only I had been there."
The first widely-publicized instance of this burgeoning trend comes to us from the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. One evening, 39-year-old James Van Iveren was sitting leisurely in the apartment he shares with his mother. He was chatting up teenage girls on MySpace, or questing World of Warcraft in the instances of Orgrimmar or whatever would-be vigilantes do in their spare time. Suddenly, he heard a noise coming from the upstairs apartment. This noise sounded suspiciously like a woman screaming for help. Could it be, he thought? Had his long-awaited chance to be the knight in shining armor finally arrived? Not wanting to waste any opportunities, Van Iveren grabbed his handy cavalry sword and stormed upstairs.
Meanwhile, Van Iveren's upstairs neighbor had settled in for the evening to enjoy some of life's more Dionysian pleasures. He opened up the grimy DVD he had rented from the poorly lit back room of his local Hollywood Video, popped it in the player, dimmed the lights, cracked open a cold one and began to watch. A grin slowly crept across his face as a woman named "Nectarine" shrieked in ecstasy on his TV screen.
Before this anonymous upstairs neighbor knew what was what, Van Iveren kicked down his front door. He pushed his neighbor up against the wall, pressing his sword against the man's throat (I bet you didn't actually think he had a sword). "Where is she?" he shouted, much in the way that Jack Bauer would ask a terrorist, "Where's the bomb?" He then proceeded to have his neighbor show him that he was actually alone in the apartment by having him open every closet door.
Satisfied, and perhaps mildly disappointed that no actual rape was taking place, Van Iveren returned home to his mother while his neighbor called the authorities. Once the police arrived, he showed them his filthy DVD in an attempt to show that the screams emanating from his apartment were not coming from a woman in fear of her life, but instead from Nectarine. The police then went downstairs and arrested Van Iveren on charges of criminal trespassing, criminal damage and disorderly conduct while using a dangerous weapon. To add insult to injury, they also confiscated his sword.
As scary as it seems, Van Iveren has an even more dangerous counterpart. Across the pond, in a suburb south of Stockholm, a sixty-something taxi driver saw two young men chasing a half-naked woman down the street. Naturally, he assumed that the scantily-clad lass was about to be raped.
A sensible person would have shouted at the young men to scare them off, or perhaps might have honked their horn. They may have called the police.
This taxi driver, whose anonymity was protected by the courteous Swedish press, was not one of these people. He looked at the supposed rapist. He looked at his gas pedal. He looked back at the rapist, and he floored it. "Hit pedestrian now, ask questions later." His taxi lurched forward and knocked one of the young men over, ending the chase for good.
As you might assume from the fact that I am writing this, the scene witnessed by the taxi driver was not an attempted rape. Instead, one of the young men was the woman's boyfriend, and she had stormed out in a prissy huff after the two of them had a fight. In an attempt to reconcile, the woman's boyfriend chased after her to try and get her to come in from the cold.
Instead of winning back his girlfriend, he won a free trip to the emergency room. The taxi driver is now being charged with serious assault.
Kitty Genovese would have been thrilled to have a man who lives with his mother rescue her with a cavalry sword, or to have an AARP card-toting cab driver run over her attacker with a taxi.
As nice as that would be, there's such a thing as taking good Samaritanism too far. I think that the moral of today's column can best be summarized by the musical stylings of Buffalo Springfield. So, loyal readers, I urge you - stop, think, what's that sound? Everybody look what's goin' down. Paranoia strikes deep, and into your life it will creep. It starts out when you're always afraid - you step out of line, and the man comes and takes you away.
Adam Cambier '09 likes to hit pedestrians, but not because he thinks they're rapists.
