Corey, Chooch and I had such a wonderful time at the Mattress Factory while Chooch was home for spring break, but after spending around 2 hours there trying to understand what we were looking at, it was time to go to lunch!

This is something that seemed inconsequential at the time, but as we exited the building and made our way up the steps the parking lot, some people came running down the handicap ramp, screaming. It caught me off guard, but it did appear that were laughing and in good spirits, presumably having just made their way back from the annex building around the corner.

Right after, we got in Corey’s car. I was sitting in the backseat. Corey asked Chooch to recommend something to put on (thank god because it had been early 2000s Top 40 up until then, like Ja Rule-type shit lol). Chooch has really been into sad girl music lately and immediately suggested that Corey play Men I Trust.

As a somber song queued up, Chooch goes, “Not really the vibe, but…” because we were all so giddy. Well, Corey and I were. Chooch is the adult amongst the children. Meanwhile, Corey was unable to pull out of the parking lot because a box truck was blocking the one-way lane.

There were three men standing on the sidewalk to the left of the truck, trying to wave him along. The one who stands out the most vividly in my mind was a young mail man and I think because from a distance and with my bad eyes, he looked like Chooch’s friend Isai. Chooch said he remembers one of the guys was wearing a CCAC shirt, I dunno.

We didn’t think anything of this and, while we were hungry, we also didn’t have reservations or anything like that so we were pleasantly calm about having to wait to see what this truck driver was going to do. After several minutes (honestly, it was less than 4 minutes because the same Men I Trust song was still playing), the truck slowly began to roll forward so Corey swung his car out onto the road and we continued along at the same slow pace.

Slow enough for Chooch to look out of his passenger window and say, “Oh! I think that lady was hit.”

And then I made the fatal error of also looking and oh boy, if I could go back in time. Have you ever glanced at something quickly and felt a jolt, like you just took an ice plunge?  That happened to me here. Nothing about this made me think she was hit by a car. What I saw was an older woman with white/gray hair, crumpled over onto her side along the sidewalk, shoulders and up were hanging off the curb and laying on the road in between an empty space between two parked cars. She had a lot of blood on the side/top of her face.  It didn’t look possible that she could have been hit by a car on that street, definitely not the box truck. To me, there was something about the scene that screamed V I O L E N C E.

What was worse was that I looked directly into her eyes, which looked vacant and icy.

“I THINK SHE IS DEAD??!??!” I cried.

“WHAT???” Corey screamed hysterically. “SHOULD WE TURN AROUND????”

But we had just arrived at a stop sign in time to see a fleet of cops, sirens on, rushing toward us, so there was clearly no need for us to go back, call it in, etc.

 

This is the illustration I made while I was explaining the sitch to Megan at work. Look, I was rushed. It was almost 5:30 and neither of us need to be staying logged on a minute more than required.

But here is an updated version to illustrate that the placement of the body was likely blocked by the box truck, therefore the men directing the truck to move seemed calm because they likely didn’t know w maybe-dead body was splayed out across the street, and that would also explain why the people who were coming into the Mattress Factory from the Annex seemed in good spirits – if that truck hadn’t been idling there, they probably would have seen the lady and would actually have been screaming as they ran past us as I originally  thought. (Corey and Chooch quickly shot down my second-questioning if we misinterpreted the mood of their screams.)

We did have to circle back around, but on a parallel street, since everything is one-way there. As we passed the intersection from the upper street, I looked down and saw that the cops had blocked the entire area off by then and a sizeable group of onlookers had gathered. I had texted immediately to tell him to find out what was happening, if this lady was attacked, mugged, murdered and dumped, etc. We were all totally fixated and unable to let go.

We drove in silence for a few seconds, and, realizing that Men I Trust was still warbling on in the background, I said, “Well, now it’s the vibe for this music.” And we all laughed drily.

Then Chooch said that one of his friends from Drexel had been to Pgh once and went to Randyland which is on the same street and joked to Chooch to “be careful, that’s a bad area.” And then, surprise, maybe-dead body outside of the Mattress Factory. :/

Meanwhile, Henry was at home checking the police scanner. He was able to find out that the woman had been transported to AGH, a hospital that is luckily EXTREMELY close, as in right down the street, from where the woman was found so that was one silver lining. He said that probably if she was taken to the hospital, she was still alive when they found her.

“Could she have just fallen?” Corey asked, seconding what Henry was also suggesting via text. But you guys, you didn’t see her. This didn’t look like someone who had just stumbled on the sidewalk and hit her head. Especially because of where the blood was, facing up. Unless she fell and rolled over but still, the blood. There was so much.

“Head wounds bleed a lot,” Henry said later that day when I was back home and spiraling out, but I cut him off because JESUS CHRIST IS THERE ANY SUBJECT SAFE FROM HIS MANSPLAINING?!

When I say that this completely took over my life for over a week, yikes.  I haven’t even been able to bring myself to finally write about it until now. I spent ALL WEEKEND googling, looking on Pgh Reddit sub-threads, battling the shitty local news websites, seeing that lady’s glassy eyes every time I blinked. I had a very hard falling asleep that weekend.

The next day, I wanted to get coffee at Yinz Coffee on the way home from lunch and record shopping with Henry and Chooch. The Yinz Coffee location that was closest to us is actually right around the corner from the SCENE. First, I tried to get Henry to go into the hospital and inquire about her status, just said he was a concerned citizen and just wanted to know if she was alive. He very vehemently opposed this idea and said that he didn’t want to be put on a suspect list which made me say, “SO YOU AGREE THAT THIS WAS A VIOLENT CRIME AND NOT AN ACCIDENT!”

Then I made him drive past the SCENE once coffee was procured, because maybe there were clues there, a killer lurking behind a lamppost, memorial flowers left at the spot, I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WAS EXPECTING TO SEE but it was just a regular slab of sidewalk. Nothing unusual.

I had my weekly therapy session on Tuesday and she was like HOW WAS YOUR WEEKEND because I had told her the week before that we had plans and we had chatted about the Mattress Factory so watching her face change as I said, “IT WAS GOOD BUT THEN….” Well, it was something to behold.

We ended up spending half the session talking about this, trying to rationalize it, best-case-scenario it, make it less sinister in my mind. “Maybe picture her surrounded by a white light?” she suggested but when I conjured that image up in my mind, all it did was serve to spotlight the BLOOD AND THOSE EYES.

---

Saturday night, when Henry and I were driving home from Philly, I blurted out entirely apropos of nothing, “But if she just FELL or something innocent, why did so many cops arrive on the scene?”

Henry looked at me blankly. To be fair, I had been quietly dwelling on this in my corner of the car and brought him into mid-stream of conscious so he had no idea what I was talking about, also because he hasn’t been thinking about it constantly like I have.

On Sunday, we went out with Amy & Dick and I was clamoring to talk about this with someone. That’s just my nature – something happens and I have to rehash it over and over with every new audience put in front of me. So, I’m telling them this story and Henry interrupts.

“Actually, I do know what happened,” he said calmly, in the same manner used for advising your table mates that you know what you want to order for lunch.

I turned on him instantly. “WTF??? Since when?” I cried.

“Since last night. I went back and listened to the calls that came in over the police scanner before the one I originally heard,” he said.

“YOU KNEW SINCE LAST NIGHT?” I screamed. “IT IS NOW—” (checks time on FitBit) “—2:30pm on Sunday! YOU WERE WITH ME ALL DAY AND DIDN’T THINK TO SAY ANYTHING?”

“I forgot,” he calmly shrugged.

Anyway, as I expected, it was not something innocent like she tripped and fell. Oh but she did fall, alright – WHEN SHE FUCKING JUMPED OUT A SECOND STORY WINDOW OR THE ROOF, THEY ARE NOT SURE.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck – this had to have JUST HAPPENED before we walked out of the Mattress Factory. If I had fucking seen that.

If I had watched a person fall out of a building onto a sidewalk.

IF I HEARD IT.

I would have to double-down on therapy.

No. Nope.

And apparently according to the scanner, when it was originally called in, it was picked up by the paramedics so Henry didn’t hear that call, just the one that was made to the cops because they got involved once someone said she had jumped, and I guess they originally thought she was DOA until the cops got there and realized she was still alive.  WHY  DID SHE JUMP? Was she in imminent danger? Is there a perp out there somewhere that got away?? I want to say that I hope she is alive but if she did this to herself intentionally I can’t imagine the pain she was already in, so I am on a loop of hypotheticals over here, freaking myself out.

And then I am still hyper-fixated on the box truck and the three men. Are they even relevant to the story? Was the box truck driver the one who saw it and called it in? Were the three men involved other than just trying to get the box truck to stop holding up traffic on this otherwise innocuous residential street? WERE THEY THE WITNESSES?

UGH. I’ll probably never get the answers and need to let it go.

 

 

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