Over the weekend, my good friend Torman posted an entry about recently coming to the aid of a woman in distress.  It made me recall my own experience in that regard thirty-five years ago…

It could have been a dream.  I had just gone to bed a half-hour earlier.  Incipient sleep was interrupted by a desperate knocking on my door in an apartment  complex in Eagan, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

“Who is it?”  I slipped a robe over my T-shirt and shorts, my eye pressed to the one-way viewer in the door.

“Please—let me in.  Hurry!  My husband is going crazy!”

My apartment was located at one end of the third floor, the door staring down a long corridor.  I could see the face of the woman who was pounding on my door.  I vaguely recognized her as a neighbor from a few units down.  I let her in.

She was in her early twenties, around my age.  Her long auburn hair was tangled and disheveled.  Tears rolled down her face; an ugly welt was forming under her puffy left eye.  And she was naked from the waist up. 

Sheepishly averting my gaze from her bare breasts, I took off my robe and wrapped it around her and led her into the living room and sat her on the sofa.  I excused myself for a moment to put on a pair of pants and a purple Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt in my bedroom, then went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of water and brought them into the living room.  I remember checking that the double locks on the door were bolted. 

I offered her one of the waters and debated where to sit.  Would she prefer the comfort of a fellow human being next to her, or was another male presence in close proximity to her too threatening?  I chose the recliner across from her and raised my glass in her direction.  “I’m Ken,” I offered lamely, afraid I sounded like I was hitting on her at a bar.

“I’m Andrea.  My husband has gone berserk.  And he’s got a hunting rifle.”

As if on cue, there was a banging again at my door.  From the rage and the obscenities echoing down the corridor, it was clear the mad husband was trying to locate his wife.  I went to my hall closet and retrieved my own Winchester .22, but the rage and the obscenities receded down the hall and disappeared.

“I’m going to call the police, OK?”  I hoped she wouldn’t raise any objections about her husband getting carted away by the gendarmes.  Fortunately, she didn’t; she just nodded glumly and sipped her water.

A squad car arrived about five minutes later; I saw it from the living room window.  It was then that a form of lunacy took hold of me.

Gesturing to Andrea to remain where she was, I walked to the door and peered through the viewer down the hall.  It was empty, and all the doors were shut.  Opening my door quickly, I ran the ten feet to the staircase leading down to the street level.  I met the officers at the entrance.

“Hi.  I’m the guy that called this in. I thought I’d come down and let you know what’s going on.”  I gave them a brief recap of what I knew, and then led them up to the second floor. 

Opening the door to the hallway there, I pointed out where Andrea’s apartment was located and where mine was so that when they reached the next floor, they’d have an idea of the layout.  Once I was done, I started to lead them up the final flight of stairs.

“Uh, sir,” one of them said.  “We need you to stay on the landing here.  We’ll come and get you when it’s safe.”

I waited on the landing alone, the reality of the situation finally beginning to sink in.  I held my breath, dreading the sound of firearms discharging, but after about five uneventful minutes, one of the officers came down the stairs.

“OK, sir.  My partner is with the suspect in his apartment.  We want you to go back to your unit, then my partner will escort the suspect to our cruiser.  After that, I’ll come back to your apartment and bring his wife back to her apartment.”

“What’s going to happen with her?  Will she be safe?”

“Sir, she’ll be OK.  The husband isn’t going to be anywhere near her tonight.  Our people will work with her to figure out what she wants to do after that.  Thank you for your interest.”

I went back to my apartment and relayed to Angela what the officer had just told me.  Her face was a jumble of relief, anxiety, and uncertainty.  “Thank you for everything,” she told me.

The officer rapped sharply on the door, identifying himself by name.  Angela got up and we walked to the door.  The officer brought her down the hall to her apartment, talking to her as they went. 

I never saw her again.  The apartment was vacant a month later.  I never did discover what happened to Angela or her husband.

As I look back over three and a half decades to this incident, I have questions.  Did I do the right thing?  No, that’s not right:  of course it was the right thing.  Was it the prudent thing?  Had I exposed myself to an unacceptable level of risk and just got lucky?  God protects fools, drunks, and children, they say.  How would I react, confronted with similar circumstances today?

I’ve got no real answers.

Oh, and I never got my robe back from Angela, either.

© 2009, Kenneth M. Rhodes

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