one September morning: Guy

Every September, here on the podcast we feature a guest who has a personal experience with 9/11.

Most people remember exactly where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the US using hijacked airplanes. It was a dark day for this country.

This month, What Was That Like is publishing a 3-part series titled one September morning. In each episode, you’ll hear someone telling their personal story about what they experienced on that day. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to subscribe and follow the show so you don’t miss an episode.

Today is the third and final episode in this series, and we hear from Guy.

Guy was an EMS Supervisor for a private ambulance company. He talks of co-workers that were literally pulled from the rubble, those who are still missing, and those who left spouses and children behind. We’ll have pictures of some of his co-workers in the episode notes. Guy also has ongoing health issues as a result of his time spent at Ground Zero. But he doesn’t regret rushing toward danger, and he would do it again if needed.

 

 

 

 

Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:

https://WhatWasThatLike.com/190

 

Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.

 

Want to discuss this episode and other things with thousands of other WWTL listeners? Join our podcast Facebook group at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook (many of the podcast guests are there as well)

 

Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):

Every September, here on the podcast we feature a guest who has a personal experience with 9/11.

 

Most people remember exactly where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the US using hijacked airplanes. It was a dark day for this country.

 

This month, What Was That Like is publishing a 3-part series titled one September morning. In each episode, you’ll hear someone telling their personal story about what they experienced on that day. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to subscribe and follow the show so you don’t miss an episode.

 

Today is the third and final episode in this series, and we hear from Guy.

 

Guy was an EMS Supervisor for a private ambulance company. He talks of co-workers that were literally pulled from the rubble, those who are still missing, and those who left spouses and children behind. We’ll have pictures of some of his co-workers in the episode notes. Guy also has ongoing health issues as a result of his time spent at Ground Zero. But he doesn’t regret rushing toward danger, and he would do it again if needed.

 

 

Guy

My name is Guy Sanders. I’m a 911 first responder and a volunteer at the 9/11 Tribute Museum in downtown Manhattan. Today I’m going to be telling you my 9/11 story. On Tuesday, September 11th of 2001, I was working part-time for a private ambulance company in Brooklyn. Because EMTs don’t make a lot of money, I was working full time in an office out in Long Island, which is a suburb of New York City. I was on my way to work that morning – a beautiful sunny morning, not a cloud in the sky. I was driving along the highway. I noticed the traffic was heavier going into Long Island than it normally is. Usually, most people are driving into the city. I was listening to music. I wasn’t listening to the radio, so I didn’t pay any attention to it.

 

When I got to my office, I saw that there were clusters of my coworkers sitting around each other’s desks, listening to the radio. Of course, that was our primary resource of information then. This is before Facebook and before smartphones. When I asked what was going on, some of my coworkers said that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center,

 

Like most people that day, I thought perhaps it was a small plane, a private plane, or someone was learning how to fly and got disoriented, or someone was flying a small plane and got sick. But after another 20 minutes or so went by, we heard about the second plane hitting the second tower, and I knew at that moment that it wasn’t an accident. I knew we were under some type of attack. Again, I said I’m an emergency medical technician, so my first instinct was that they would probably need help down there, but I didn’t want to just run down there, I wanted to be part of an organized effort. So, I started calling my ambulance company. Every time I called, the line was busy. We had 5 or 6 different extensions. I called every single extension and, every time I called, the lines were busy. It was starting to get frustrating.

 

In the interim, in my office, one of my coworkers was starting to cry because her boyfriend worked in one of the towers of the World Trade Center, and she was calling him and she couldn’t reach him. So, she was very distraught and people were trying to comfort her, which heightened my sense of urgency. So I continued to try to call my ambulance company repeatedly over and over again and I still couldn’t get through. At some point, I talked to one of my coworkers and I said to him, “Washington DC is next.” And he says, “No, I think they proved their point.” Then, we heard about the plane that hit the Pentagon.

 

Now, my sense of urgency got even higher and I kept calling my ambulance company. In the interim, in my office, some of the computers went down and some of the phones stopped working, but I still kept trying to call my ambulance company over and over again. At this point, I was so frustrated. I walked outside into the parking lot and I noticed that the office building right next to our office was evacuating. They were the United States Department of Immigration and Naturalization. So I came back inside and I found my human resources director. I said, “Listen, they are evacuating the building next door.” And he said, “Shh, don’t say anything. We’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do,” which got me aggravated.

 

I ran back to my desk and I called my ambulance company again and I got through. I said, “Do you need me?” They said, “We need everybody.” I told them I was on my way. So I stood up in my office and I announced to everyone, “They evacuated the office building next door and I’m on my way down there. You’re on your own.” And I left. Incidentally, they did end up letting everyone leave early but they made them make up the time. So at this point, I rushed out to my car and I got on the highway.

 

Now, this is New York and most people are familiar with how traffic can be in New York. But as I got on the highway heading toward Manhattan, I realized that my car was the only car on the highway. Since we were under attack, the police had closed off all the major highways, thoroughfares, bridges, and tunnels leading into Manhattan, except for emergency vehicles and first responders. Like some type of bizarre dream or a movie, I was on the highway by myself. I drove as fast as I could through Nassau County, through the borough of Queens, to my residence in Brooklyn. I ran upstairs, changed into my uniform, grabbed my equipment, ran back to my car, and I drove as quickly as I could to my ambulance company, which was in central Brooklyn.

 

By the time I had gotten there, the place was a beehive of activity. We had people rushing all over the place. We had our regular calls but we had some of our ambulances who were sent down to the hospitals in the vicinity of the World Trade Center to remove people from the emergency room who had come there with minor injuries or minor illnesses to take them to farther away hospitals so that the hospitals that were closer to ground zero would be able to better treat the people who were rescued. We didn’t know at the time, but after the first couple of waves, there really weren’t going to be that many more people.

 

I spoke to my operations manager and I told him, “Listen, I don’t want to do that duty. I want to be down at ground zero.” And he said, “I understand. You have experience. I’m going to make sure you get down there.” So he gave me an ambulance. He gave me a partner. He gave me 15 extra tanks of oxygen and he told me to report to Beth Israel hospital, which is in downtown Manhattan around 15th Street and 2nd Avenue. The reason why he didn’t send me directly to the scene was this thing called the Tokyo Rule.

 

In 1995-1996 in Tokyo, Japan, there was a terror attack where a nerve agent, sarin gas, was released on the subway system. As first responders came there, they were overcome by the gas and then more responders came and they also were overcome. So, all the rescuers needed to be rescued. To make sure that wasn’t a repeat of this type of thing, they developed this rule where if you had a mass casualty incident – which is what the attacks on the World Trade Center towers was considered and there’s something catastrophic happened as what happened when the towers collapse – they were going to wait until things settled before sending. So I was going to be in that next wave of rescuers to go in after they told us it was going to be stable enough for us to go in.

 

I started heading to Beth Israel Hospital, but before I left my ambulance base, I noticed that there was a large whiteboard near the operation center and there were 10 numbers on that board. Those 10 numbers were for 10 ambulances from my company that were missing and whose crews were unaccounted for. So in spite of this, I made my way through Brooklyn into Manhattan. I was on a main thoroughfare, Flatbush Avenue. They had changed it from a two-way intersection traffic to have one side regular two-way traffic and the other side was just emergency vehicles going into the city into Manhattan from Brooklyn. So I’m driving through as quickly as I can.

 

I got to the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge and a police officer stopped me. He’s got 5 firefighters in full gear with him. He said to me, “Listen, these guys are getting ready to walk across the bridge. Is it possible you can drive them across?” Of course, I said, yes. So I jammed them in the back of my ambulance. Now my ambulance isn’t one of those large ambulances like you see the fire department has. It’s one of the smaller van ambulances, but I was able to jam all of those people into that ambulance with the extra tanks of oxygen and take them across the Brooklyn Bridge. They were still people walking from Manhattan across the bridge. They were covered with this dust. I was driving into a cloud of dust.

 

When I got to the other side, into the Manhattan side, only a few blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood, I looked around, I let the firefighters out, but everything was covered with this gray dust. It looked like gray snow. There were still fires burning. There were cars that were crushed, and where I used to be able to see the World Trade Center towers, all I saw was smoke and hints of twisted metal and steel. I didn’t stay there long. I wanted to get to my deployment as quickly as possible, so I reported up to Beth Israel Hospital. At this point, because I’m an EMS supervisor, I met with other supervisors and we were briefed by a fire department EMS supervisor. They assigned ambulances to us. I received 5 ambulances and he told us where we were going to deploy at. We deployed on Liberty and East End Avenue.

 

While this was happening, some of my coworkers who had initially been reported missing were being brought back to Beth Israel Hospital. When we saw them, most of them were what we consider walking wounded or they didn’t have any visible injuries, they were able to walk on their own. We were just so happy to see them. They were covered with this dust. We ran up to them, we hugged them, we kissed them, and we started joking with them. Some of them were literally pulling debris and rubble out of their pockets because they had been pulled out of the rubble themselves. While this was occurring, we were told various stories about what they had experienced.

 

Down the line, I heard stories about how one of my coworkers was by his ambulance because what they did was one EMT would stay by the ambulance as a driver, and as people were being triaged, they would bring them out to the next available ambulance to be transported to the hospital. His partner was inside. He was outside by the ambulance when the tower started to collapse and he had to run for his life. The debris was starting to catch up to him, so he dove underneath a fire truck, but the force of the debris lifted up the truck that he was under.

 

I later heard another story about– we had a thing what we call the MERV, a mobile emergency response vehicle. It’s like a large RV. It looks like a large recreational vehicle but it actually has a lot of medical equipment and stretchers and oxygen and propane tanks and all sorts of things that are combustible in it and it was parked near the towers as they started to collapse and debris started to hit them and make it rock. One of our managers was inside and he said he was going to jump out of the vehicle through one of the windows, but it started to flip over onto his side. He grabbed the mattress and pulled over to try to protect himself. He said he heard this large crash and then an explosion. Then, when he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but blackness and it was silence. He said, at first, he thought he was dead but then, he realized, “I’m not dead.” But he couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t navigate anywhere. But he said, through this black smoke came this hand that grabbed him by the arm and lifted him up, and it was a firefighter. He looked at him and said, “Run.” And they both started to run.

 

As they were running, he said, this debris field was following them. They got to a place that looked like a dead end and he thought he was going to have to jump over the railing into the river, but he said, at the very last second, the firefighter grabbed him and tossed him through these revolving doors. As he spun into these doors, he saw this huge debris field go past but he said the firefighter never made it in with him. We also got word that one of my coworkers did not survive. She had passed away. I’ll talk a little bit more about her a little later on.

 

So in the midst of all of this, we get the word that it’s time for my group to start heading down to where we were deploying. So we drove down, lights and sirens blaring, and we finally got to where we were deploying. I got briefed by the vice president of my ambulance company who had been there when the towers fell. I checked in with a fire department, EMS captain, myself, and another supervisor from my ambulance company.

 

As we started to deploy our people and set up things, getting our equipment out of the ambulances and so forth and checking in, I noticed that, in the middle of the rubble on a little plastic chair, there was a US Army soldier. She was a staff sergeant. She was wearing a class B uniform, so she had on her beret, she had her ribbons on. She was also wearing a surgical mask and latex gloves. She was sitting in that little plastic chair with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her laps. I walked over to her and I said, “Are you all right?” She said, “I’m a US army recruiter. I was on my way into my office in the World Trade Center when I saw a plane hit the building.” She said that she was also an emergency medical technician.

 

So when they set up the triage area, she went in there to help with triage and she said that’s where she was when the tower started to collapse and she ran for her life. Then she got really quiet, and she said, “I’m thinking about the people that I left behind when I ran out of the building,” and I realized she was feeling guilty because she had saved her own life. I didn’t want to leave her alone by herself that way, so I said to her, “Listen, you obviously have a lot more experience. They’re the people I’m working with here. Why don’t you come with us and help us out? We could benefit from your knowledge and expertise.” She came with us and we kept her with us. I think she stayed with us until about midnight that night when we were relieved.

 

Interestingly, she said that she had been in Bosnia and I asked her, I said, “You look like you’ve seen a lot of action in different places” She had a lot of ribbons there. She said, “Yeah.” “I guess you never thought you’d see anything like that here.” And she says, “No. Most of the time when we were there, there wasn’t a lot for us to do.”

 

At one point, not long after we got there, we got a call that there was an elderly person trapped in her apartment. There’s a housing complex across the street from the World Trade Center – a large complex. Apparently, there was an elderly woman because all the power was off in her building. She was trapped in the 33rd floor of her apartment building. So we had to go into that building, climb up the 33 flights of stairs, and carry her down to get her out of the building.

 

At one point there was a firefighter who came up to me because he had a lot of dust and debris in his eyes and he wanted us to wash out his eyes with sterile water. So I said, “Okay, sure. Have a seat right here.” And he said, “No, I’m not going to sit down. If I sit down, you’re going to try to make me lay down, you’re going to try to take me out of here and I’m not going anywhere. So I’m going to stand here and you do what you need to do.” So I stood there and we did what we needed to do.

 

Around 5.25 in the afternoon, building seven of the World Trade Center started to come down. We were about a block and a half away when that took place. There were a group of firefighters – maybe 20 firefighters – walking in the direction of our staging area in a very deliberate manner. There was no angst about it. One of them happened to turn to me and said, “Hey, you should probably move. This building’s getting ready to go.” And they all just kept walking. I was like, “Whoa, it’s getting ready to go. All right, everybody, we have to get our equipment together. Take all our stretchers and all our equipment. Leave the ambulances in place because they were charged fire lines and you don’t want to drive over a charged fire line because you could cut off water to firefighters who were fighting fires. We’re going to go half a block over to the east.”

 

One of my people actually said to me, “Well, they told us we should be safe here.” I pointed to the crushed fire trucks, the overturned ambulances, and the smoldering police cars, and I said, “They told them they were going to be safe there too. Why are you even questioning me?” So most of that evening, what we did was we actually just dealt with other first responders – the injuries that they received going in and looking for people to save, looking for their brother firefighters, their fellow police officers. That’s a lot of what we did on our first night.

 

I have to say that my cell phone service was intermittent at that time. One of the reasons for that is because the two World Trade Center towers being the tallest buildings in the city, in addition to the large radio tower on the north tower, they had a series of repeaters and other towers for cell phones on top of them. So when they collapsed, it disrupted cell phone service in addition to the high volume of calls that were going out during that time. So my phone was working intermittently. That’s why when my phone finally rang after not having had a dial tone for a while, I was surprised.

 

I picked it up and it was my best friend – his name is Jason. He said, “Oh, I just want to make sure you were there.” And I’m like, “Why?” Cause he knew I had the two jobs. He said, “Because I’m thinking about all the people who went to work today to a job that they hated and died at a job that they hated. I know that if you went there and something happened to you, you were doing what you wanted to do.” That was something that was very profound to me and it really made me think and kind of changed the direction of my life because, at that point, I decided I needed to start working EMS full-time because I never ever wanted to be in a situation again, where help was needed and I couldn’t immediately respond.

 

Because I made that decision in 2005, I was able to respond with 65 people from my ambulance company and 15 ambulances from New York to Louisiana for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and I’m proud of my service there. It was something that, I said, was an event that touches me still today. It’s a picture here of myself down there.

 

The gentleman here, my partner, his name was Wesley Watson. He also was a part-time supervisor with my ambulance company. His full-time job, however, was as a professional jazz drummer. He was an excellent jazz drummer. I’d seen him perform on many occasions. He played at the White House with the Lionel Hampton orchestra three times. He performed all over the world and performed with Wilson Pickett and Ashford and Simpson and Whitney Houston and all kinds of other talented luminaries. Wesley passed away in September of 2010. I believe that his illnesses were related to the time that he spent down at Ground Zero. He was down there actually more often than I was. He had been deployed down there. I definitely miss him.

 

A month after that, I was diagnosed with a rare cancer – a carcinoid cancer – which is a neuroendocrine tumor that I got, that is credited to my service down at Ground Zero. Since then, I’ve had three major surgeries. They removed 2.5 feet of my small intestine, part of my liver, and my gallbladder. I had two of my heart valves replaced. Now, about two weeks ago, I was told that those two valves that were replaced are now defective and I’m going to have to undergo open heart surgery again. However, if one were to ask me if I was to do that again, not only would I do it again, but if I had to do it over, I would have left earlier.

 

Now, people think that’s a sacrifice but there were eight emergency medical technicians who paid the ultimate sacrifice on that day. Of these eight emergency medical services personnel, I personally knew or met with three of them. The gentleman here in the black and white picture, his name is Mario Santoro. When Mario was a brand new emergency medical technician, he came to my volunteer ambulance corps in Queens to learn the trade and I was in charge of training him. Mario had actually made it home after working a double shift and he lived in downtown Manhattan. When he heard about what happened and he could see the towers burning from his home, he told his wife he had to go back even though he had just gotten home.

 

Mario and his partner here, Keith Fairburn, who was assigned as his partner when he went back, both lost their lives down at the World Trade Center. That day, Mario left behind a 2-year-old daughter and a 5-month-old son. This gentleman here, his name is David Marc Sulins. I also knew Marc. He worked at Cabrini Medical Center. He had also worked a double but went back in order to help out, and he lost his life helping out on that day.

 

This young lady here was my coworker. Her name is Yamel Merino. She was deployed from the Bronx. Her partner was outside standing by the ambulance and she was inside with the president and vice president of my ambulance company. When the tower started to collapse, they all ran for their lives and they exited the building together. But once they got outside, they separated. Whereas the president and vice president of my company survived that day, Yamel did not. Yamel, who was a 24-year-old single mom with an 8-year-old son, she was the first of all the first responders’ funerals and I’ll always remember her funeral. It was raining lightly that day and her son had on a yellow, a bright yellow slicker. Right before we lowered her coffin, there was a blast from the siren and we all saluted and you could hear people audibly crying. Her son went over to her coffin and hugged her coffin, and I’ll always remember that. It’s seared into my memory.

 

Now that 20 years have passed, what can I say? We’re getting ready to go into this 20th anniversary. Life has changed inalterably for many people. There are 1,100 people who died that day that left no trace. They could not be found. A lot of their families don’t have closure. So it’s 20 years later and they still haven’t found a trace of them. Of the over 2000 people who died on that day, there have been at least almost the same amount of people that have died from cancers and respiratory ailments and other serious ailments related to September 11th 20 years later. And as I told you about my own medical problems, yes, 20 years later, people are still dying from the events of September 11th.

 

One of the things that sticks with me about that day 20 years later – I still remember – is the idea that your life can change in seconds. How many people that day maybe got into an argument with somebody they loved and cared about, and walked out the door, slammed the door, and said, “You know what? I’ll make it up to him later on,” but later on never came, and the last thing they said to someone that they loved and cared about was not something loving and caring. So when I think about that, I say this as a cautionary tale, whenever you’re with someone that you love and you care about and you part with them, make sure that you don’t ever leave them without telling them, “I love you.” Make sure that the last words you say to them whenever you depart from them are always happy, good words, because you never know if the last thing you say to someone is going to be the very last thing you say. What do you want that to be?

 

It’s important as we come into this 20th anniversary. I remember all the signs that said, “United, we stand.” I remember all the signs that said, “Never forget,” because we look around us in the environment that we have today where there’s so much division and anger and angst, it seems that idea of unity is gone. When I look around at how many people have forgotten how EMTs, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, construction tradesmen, transit operators, and all kinds of volunteers from all over the place, over 500,000 people from all over the world came and volunteered their time to help out in some way, whether it was sifting through the rubble for remains, whether it was serving coffee, whether it was cutting heavy steel, whether it was transporting workers back and forth, whether it was opening the churches for them to sleep, whether it was preparing meals, all of those people, many of them have gotten sick, all of them have been affected by that, but so many of us have forgotten the lessons of that day, and I think it’s important for us 20 years later to reflect.

 

I think it was important for us 20 years later to revisit why we said those things. Were they an excuse for prejudice and bigotry or whether the realization of the humanity of everyone? You listen to the reading of the names every year. There are all types of names from all types of ethnic backgrounds, all types of religious backgrounds, all types of trades, all types of professions, all of them lost their lives on that day. All of them are united in that. And you come down to the World Trade Center Memorial and you look at the waterfalls. That’s one of the symbols of that waterfall – these droplets of water come down as individuals and they pool at the bottom and then they go into this abyss for which you can’t see the end. What that symbolizes is these are individuals who came together in tragedy and went off into eternity together. They all met the same fate and it’s important for us to remember that we all will meet the same fate.

 

That’s a lesson that we should never forget. That’s a lesson that should make us united, and I think that’s one of the most important lessons that we can continue to take from the events of that day, not of the hatred of the bigotry but of our humanity, and we should keep our humanity. So I thank you for giving me this time to speak to you.

 

 

Scott

You heard Guy mentioning some people who lost their lives that day. You can see pictures of those people, and get a full transcript of this episode, at WhatWasThatLike.com/190.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this 3-part series with personal stories from 9/11. I’ve been doing a special episode each September, but this is the first time we’ve done a series like this. I’d love to hear what you think of it. It’s a horrifying event to talk about, but hearing these personal stories is how we make sure we never forget what happened that day.

 

Okay – change of pace now.

 

Doing this series on 9/11 means that we’ve been talking about a major tragedy for 3 Fridays in a row. Next Friday is supposed to be an off week with no episode – but no! We’re going to have a BONUS episode and it’s going to be a fun one. When you listen to next week’s bonus episode, you’re going to be smiling, I guarantee it. I’ll give you a hint – it’s a story about birth, but it’s not like one you’ve heard before.

 

All right, I’ve said too much already – but trust me, you’ll want to listen to that one.

 

And if you’re not in the Facebook group, here’s the question that I posted in there this past Tuesday – what’s a common social etiquette rule that makes no sense? I definitely have an opinion on that one, which I posted as my answer. And lots of other people mentioned things that came to mind. Do you have an opinion on this? Get over to the private Facebook group and let’s hear it! There are about 8000 other podcast listeners in there who are waiting for you to join the conversation. And it’s all free – at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.

 

Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.

 

And here we are at the Listener Story! This is what happens at the end of every episode – a story sent in by a listener just like you. Well, not EXACTLY like you, since this person sent in their story and you haven’t done that yet. What are you waiting for? Record an interesting personal story, 5-10 minutes long, on your phone and email it to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.

 

This week’s story is about a scary neighbor.

 

Stay safe – and I’ll see you back here in a week with that fun story that you’re going to love!

 

(listener story)

 

About six years ago, when I was a single mother, I lived alone in a tiny single-wide trailer out in the countryside. I had a neighbor who lived in the lot right behind me. We’ll call him Tony. He lived with his wife and teenage son. They were really good neighbors. They left me alone for the most part. Past introducing ourselves, when I moved in, there was really no exchange. Sometimes, we would cut each other’s grass while we were already cutting our own, so we would say thank you if we happened to see each other, but that was about it – just how I liked it. I lived there for 2.5 years.

 

One day at about noon, me and my two-year-old daughter were taking a nap. There’s a back door right outside of my room and I was woken up by somebody pounding on it. My first thought was, “Something is happening and maybe it’s my neighbor and they need my help”, but I had a really uneasy feeling about it. So, instead of opening that door, I went to look out the front door to kind of see if I could see anything going on. When I got to the door, Tony was running up to me very clearly pissed off about something. He started screaming and yelling at me things that just didn’t make any sense. He was calling me every name in the book and accusing me of completely fabricated lies and I had no idea where he was getting any of this from.

 

At this point, I’m thinking, “Ugh, he’s drunk.” Which scared the crap out of me because not only is he drunk, he’s also unhinged and irrational. I do remember him saying something though about me being a homewrecker, which is especially confusing because I barely ever see or speak to him or his family. I’m super tiny, 5’2”, and he was a lot taller than me and he worked out a lot.

 

So I kind of just froze there for a second and was like, “What are you talking about?” He swung open my storm door and barged into my living room. I backed up and that’s when I realized my two-year-old was now standing right behind me. I told her to go to the bedroom, but she didn’t listen and I didn’t want to take her myself and turn my back to Tony. So we’re arguing back and forth. He’s practically screaming into my mouth and then he started threatening me. He said he was going to kill me, he was going to kill me and my daughter, that he was going to kill my whole family. So now I was terrified.

 

I told him to get the F out, which to my surprise, he did. He ran back home and I grabbed the biggest kitchen knife I had, called 911, then my daughter’s father. I told dispatch that I had a knife and if he came back, I would use it. They sent an officer. After hanging up, he came back yelling some more. I closed the door when I was on the phone, but I didn’t think to lock it. He ripped open the door again.

 

I guess in an effort to keep him out of my house where my daughter was, I stood in the doorframe and held the knife up to him, telling him that if he didn’t leave, I would kill him. Time slowed down and every scenario played through my head, like, “How should I hold the knife? Where would stabbing him stop him the fastest? In which way is he going to block the knife? What if he fights back and takes it from me? And how am I going to live with myself after taking someone’s life?”

 

During all of this, Tony was on the step right outside of the door. So that brought him a little lower, more face-to-face, and my knife was only centimeters away from his neck. He started calling my bluff and daring me to do it, and I almost really did do it a couple of times before he told me to, but I sincerely did not want blood on my hands. I managed to back him up into my yard, threatening him with the knife some more, and I really got to tell you, they call it liquid courage for a reason because he was still trying to push himself into me. There was just so much screaming and yelling that I really couldn’t even begin to recall what exactly we were saying to each other. I’m sure the cars that drove by were wondering what the hell is going on when they saw this tiny female waving a knife and screaming at this full-grown man. They probably thought I was the bad guy.

 

But all of a sudden, a man who I came to find out was his brother pulled up in a truck and told Tony to get in and they drove away. Shortly after, my daughter’s father arrived, and then the police officer, which is crazy because her father was over 30 minutes away when I called him. After the cop talked to me, he went next door and talked to Tony’s wife, and then he left. After the cop left, I was still outside and Tony’s wife and son came over because they were concerned and didn’t know what happened but, because I was so worked up and scared and I had no idea why any of this happened, I told them to stay the F away that he just threatened to kill my daughter and I showed them the knife I had to scare him off with. His wife just came up to me and gave me the biggest hug and I just started crying on her shoulder, just letting all the fear out.

 

Tony ended up coming back a few minutes later and went to his house. They went home and my daughter’s father stood outside with a firearm hidden in his pants. He didn’t initiate any conversation or instigate, but Tony decided to now argue with him and make more violent threats. I called 911 again. The officer came back and Tony was arrested. Not to my surprise, this was not the first time that they had crossed paths. He was sent to jail but was released on bond with a protective order which kept him from being at his house.

 

Months later, when I went to court to testify, he was brought into the courtroom in an orange jumpsuit. I guess he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. He was sentenced with several charges and over a year in jail. I moved out shortly after that because I didn’t want to be anywhere near his house or his family when he was released. I know some people might think that’s just something an angry drunk person would say, that he probably wasn’t serious, but the way he was right in my face, the whole time screaming – and I mean screaming – the things he was yelling, and his body language, I completely believed that he was going to hurt me and or my two-year-old. It was more than just accusations. There were many threats and many different kinds of threats.

 

Thankfully, I haven’t had a bad neighbor since. I do kind of miss getting my grass cut for free sometimes, but you don’t tell me you’re going to kill my two-year-old and get away with it. I still see him from time to time riding around town in his work truck, and I wonder if he’s gotten sober or not. I really hope he has. Thank you, Scott, for letting me tell my drunken neighbor story. And thanks again for all the hard work you put into creating this amazing podcast.