Zwei peanuts ver valking down der strasse…

and von vas… assaulted!

Except in this case, it’s not a joke; I was assaulted Friday evening while walking home from the Metro, about 3 blocks from my home. This is, in large part, why I haven’t posted anything lately.

From what I remember, I was walking, and then all of a sudden there were police and paramedics all around me. I have no recollection at all of the attack itself. A neighbor who lived a few doors down from the incident was coming home at the time, saw two assailants walk past, saw some sort of commotion, saw the two assailants run off in separate directions, realized what had happened, and called for help. Apparently, the whole thing took less than 10 seconds. The speed with which these things take place is astounding: there is no time to think.

I had been listening to my iPod at the time, which in a free society one ought to be able to do, and which I had done hundreds of times without incident, but which made me completely unaware that someone was approaching me.

My wallet was taken, but that was all. The iPod wasn’t taken, nor were my keys, nor my briefcase nor the laptop inside of it. Not even the police or paramedics seemed to notice my work ID, tucked into my shirt pocket and attached to a lanyard around my neck. My notebook, also in my shirt pocket, was untouched as well.

I fell when I was hit and my face managed to catch on the concrete walkway of the house in front of which this happened: this was probably the worst part. The left side of my face became swollen, I had numerous cuts and abrasive wounds; there was lots of blood. I was taken to the Emergency Room at Washington Hospital Center, which found that although my nose was messed up (followup ENT visit on Friday), there were no other broken bones nor other serious damage. The swelling was dramatically reduced by Monday.

In addition to my wallet, I noticed three things missing after the incident.

First was my USB flash drive, which was in the same pocket as my keys. When we returned to the site of the incident on Saturday, we found it in the leaves.

Second was the hat I was wearing. I found this Monday–the paramedics had stuffed it into the outside pocket of my briefcase, where I hadn’t thought to look.

Third was the right lens from my glasses. This had come loose one way or another, and we had looked several times at the location, to no avail. But this morning, my some act of providence, I saw the lens sitting on the walkway where the incident happened. Whether the wind had serendipitously blown it there, or whether a helpful passer-by placed it there, I do not know, but I am quite thankful for the recovery.

Two losses from the standard operating procedure of the paramedics were the sweater and the trousers I was wearing, which were both sliced open.

It’s hard to know which bits of conventional wisdom about crime have any statistical relevance about them. One notion, at least about DC, is that when there’s a rash of such attacks, it’s more likely that there’s one group of thugs committing multiple attacks than that there are many thugs each committing a small number of attacks. In this sense I was slightly heartened to read that the police had made an arrest for a purse snatching in an adjacent neighborhood; there’s a fair probability that it was the same thugs.

I see this as a very low-probability event–sort of like anti-winning the lottery–and the chances of another event aren’t changed by the fact that this happened. I won’t, however, listen to my iPod while walking around in the evening anymore.