Violence - In West Deer Township?

This past Thursday morning, Della and I went to Kress Tire on Route 910 about two miles from the house to have a new set of tires put on her Taurus. I've used Kress for the past seven years to have flats repaired and new tires installed. The person who has often been around to help me is a man named Doug, a tall, fairly mild-mannered middle-aged man.  We usually talk about sports, children and grandchildren and railroads. On the walls of the office and waiting area hang pictures of classic locomotives and the latest Union Pacific calendar. These days the calendar is small and features black and white photos. (I remember when Dad brought the Union Pacific calendar home every year - it had magnificent photos of the American West, usually resort areas that the Union Pacific carried passengers to - the calendar today is a pale shadow of what it once was.)

Thursday morning, Della and I were sitting in the waiting room. It was a fairly pleasant morning - actually partly sunny and relatively dry. Doug was at his usual place in the room when a short man with a pretty dramatic partial goatee and wearing a cap (similar to an imam's head covering) opened the door from the outside and began talking to another man in the waiting room. He then told Doug that he was mad at Kress Tire because they charged his dad $30.00 to fix a flat tire. Doug said he'd never charged anyone $30.00 to fix a flat (I've had at least 10 flats and leaky tires taken care of at Kress and was never charged more that $19.00). The man insisted that Kress had overcharged his father and he was pretty pissed about it. In fact, he was "[f-bomb] mad". Doug again denied he had ever done that and that it was Kress' policy not to charge that much. (While all of this was going on, I was reading the sports page of the Tribune-Review and Della was working on a crossroad puzzle.) The man turned and left but not before he repeated that he was still "[f-bomb] mad". Doug got up and followed the man outside. He said, "Hey, wait a minute. You owe the lady an apology." There was a short pause and suddenly we heard a man screaming "I've been stabbed".

The three of us in the waiting room ran outside. Doug was on his back on the ground, blood was everywhere. He was clutching his arm, but the way he was holding it led me to think he had been stabbed in the abdomen or the groin. Others arrived, one started to make a tourniquet, another called 911, another actually flagged down a police car on 910. Some others tried to stop the stabber, but he was in a small pickup and sped out of the parking lot onto the highway. Five minutes later the ambulance arrived and I got a good glimpse of the wound: the man had cut through the muscle of the lower arm, almost to the bone. As I said, blood was everywhere. It had spattered on Doug's face and his glasses. The EMTs were trying to keep Doug from going into shock. By this time, four more policemen arrived in four separate cars. Once Doug had been taken to the hospital, the police began to take statements from all of us. This happened between 11:30 and 11:45. By 12:15 Della and I were writing a description of what we had witnessed to submit to the police. Then we stood around another 15 minutes talking to the others there. We finally got around to paying for the tires and left.

We have subsequently learned that Doug will most likely not be able to use his right hand. The damage to the tendons and muscle was so severe it apparently cannot be repaired. I heard third-hand that the man had recently been released from prison for murdering another man. Who knows? The man he spoke to in the waiting room knew him, and described him as "crazy". Some of the Kress workers copied down the license number of the man's truck. He stabbed Doug with a "razor knife". The stabber was apprehended later that afternoon.A young policeman (he couldn't have been more than 22 or 23) kept telling us that "this doesn't happen" in West Deer. He either didn't know or didn't want us to know that five years ago a man stabbed his wife to death in West Deer and tried to hide the body. He was arrested and is spending the rest of his life in one of PA's penal institutions.

Needless to say, Della and I were pretty upset about this. Prior to this the most violent thing I ever witnessed was a NYC demolition derby involving a taxi and several other vehicles near St. Patrick's Cathedral in the early 60s.