Screams in the Night |
|
"Oh my, God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!" At three-twenty in the morning screams broke the night's slumber. In an apartment building across the street, as lights flashed on, windows were thrown open and silhouettes appeared within to bear witness to a figure kneeling over a prostrate woman. "Let that girl alone!" a man yelled from an open window. The perpetrator looked up, shrugged his shoulders, and walked to his car. But he didn't flee. He waited. "I had a feeling that this man would close his window and go back to sleep, and sure enough he did," he would later say. He calmly changed from a stocking cap to a black fedora while his victim, bleeding from four stab wounds, staggered around a corner toward the safety of her home. No one came. Lights went out as quiet again settled over the scene. Confident that no one in his audience would interfere with his handiwork, the assailant left his car and caught up with the girl. "I'm dying! I'm dying!" As lights once again flashed on and windows were once again thrown open, the assailant hurried to his car and drove away. A city bus passed. The wounded girl stumbled around another corner to the opposite side of the block where the attacks first began and took refuge behind one of the freshly painted brown doors to her apartment house. Still no one came to her aid. The man returned and began searching for his victim. After peering into the windows of a railroad station and a coffee shop, he moved on to the apartment building where, testing one door at a time, he found his terrified prey, bleeding on a vestibule floor. "She was twisting and turning and I don't know how many times or where I stabbed her until she was fairly quiet," her attacker recalled at his subsequent trial. After she was "fairly quiet," he tore off her clothes and sexually molested her while a door upstairs opened two or three times, but no one appeared. Meanwhile, on the phone to a friend in Nassau County, Long Island, one apartment resident asked for advice about what to do. It was eventually determined that he should call the police. Not wanting to be identified as a witness, he crossed a roof to make the call from a neighbor's apartment. But it didn't matter any more. For Kitty Genovese, it was too late. She died that early March morning in 1964 in a series of attacks witnessed by at least thirty-eight people. Yet no one came to her aid, not even a man she recognized and called to by name. Nor did anyone lift a finger to call the police until she was already dead, thirty-five minutes after her screams first awoke the residents of that Kew Gardens apartment in Queens, New York. Ironically, her killer, on his way home that night, stopped to assist a motorist who had fallen asleep at a traffic light. The man who had crossed the roof to call the police, explaining why it had taken him so long to summon help, sounded the theme to a fugue that would sting the newswire nerves of our collective conscience, "I didn't want to get involved." |