“If you call the police, I’ll kill you”

(Here’s a big departure… Not much joy here. I wrote this in May 2022 after the shootings in Uvalde, Texas. Reading about the kids there calling 911 for help reminded me of the day I also tried calling 911 30 years earlier to no success.)

On a Friday afternoon in July, three days after I turned 12, a man wearing a ski-mask and holding a gun walked in through the front door of our house in a suburb of Washington, DC.

I had been reading in my bedroom when I heard screams — not the silly screams of children having fun which normally wouldn’t draw my attention — but sounds of terror I’d never heard outside of movies.

I cracked open my door and at the end of the hallway, fifteen feet away, I saw a nightmare: a man dressed in black from ski-mask to combat boots pointing his gun at my tiny siblings.

“If you call the police, I’ll kill you”

I heard him say that if anyone called the police he’d kill everyone in the house.

Somehow he didn’t see me, so I crept out of my room and silently sneaked into my parents’ room. I almost collided with my mom as she was coming out of the bathroom and going to see what kind of mischief those energetic kids were getting into, and to tell them not to scream like that.

I whispered that there was a guy in our house with a gun, pointing it at my younger siblings. A variety of emotions flashed over her face — a mix of confusion, fright, panic, rage, determination. She said she was going to talk to the guy and get him away from my siblings.

She told me to call 911 and I told her about his threat to kill everyone if we called the police. She hadn’t heard any of this from the bathroom but she said to hide under her bed and do it as quietly as possible — and that the police would come quickly and save us. 

Then she ran into the hallway to face the gunman.

I was terrified he’d kill my family, but I knew my mom was right — the police existed to save people.

Just dial those three magic numbers

All I had to do was press the three numbers on our phone that had been hammered into my head my entire life — from my parents, from TV shows and movies, and from every teacher I’d ever had at the six schools I’d attended by that point in three states.

Call 911 in case of emergencies and the police will arrive immediately with lights flashing and guns drawn to stop the bad guys. I’d never needed to call them but they were always the heroes on TV shows and movies which must have been the case for a reason. By the age of 12, I’d seen tons of police cars speeding with sirens blasting and I assumed they were rushing to save kittens, children, and the day.

I quietly stretched the cord of the landline telephone under my parents’ bed and rolled under it myself to press those three magic buttons.

When the 911 operator answered, I whispered “HELP! There’s a man with a gun in my house!”

The operator said I had to speak up, so I tried adding a tiny amount of volume to my whisper and repeated the same sentence.

Begging for help from under the bed

Again, the operator said I had to speak up, so again I tried adding a tiny amount of volume to my whisper and repeated “HELP! There’s a man with a gun in my house!”

This happened again and again.

I pleaded as quietly as possible that the man with the gun was threatening to kill us if we called 911 but since I’d called them anyway, could they please send the police?

The operator said she needed to speak to my mom and I told her that my mom was with the gunman as well — so please send the police.

The operator insisted again that I get my mom on the phone and I was starting to panic and said she couldn’t come to the phone because she was with the man with the gun — so please send the police.

She said she couldn’t send the police until she spoke to my mom and I again said that my mom couldn’t come to the phone for the exact reason that I was calling 911.

I was trying to stay as quiet as possible so the man with the gun wouldn’t hear me and kill my family but I was getting mad.

Adult needed to prove the validity of an emergency

What was the point of indoctrinating kids with the importance of calling this number “in the event of an emergency,” if you need an adult to verify why the kids are calling for help?

What if an adult is the reason a child needs to call 911?

I kept pleading for her to send help and she kept saying she needed me to get my mom on the phone in order to send help.

Then she said she couldn’t send the police because I was refusing to pass the phone to my mom, so that meant I was pulling a prank.

This 911 operator in Prince William County, Virginia, had the gall to suggest a terrified child, desperately begging for help from under her parents’ bed, was playing a prank on the police.

I could not believe this at the time, and decades later, I can still barely believe it.

I told her that I was 12 years old, I’d just had my birthday, and I could think of dozens of things I’d rather be doing than wasting my summer vacation on a prank as pointless and not remotely fun or funny as this one. She warned me I could get in serious trouble for pranking the police.

If this is a prank, come teach me a lesson

I was running out of ideas to get her to believe me. I didn’t know I’d have to rack my brain for creative ways to convince this authority figure to believe me. What was happening in the hallway? In the rest of the house? I couldn’t hear anything through the bedroom door. How were my little sisters? My brother? My mom?

How else could I get in touch with the police?

Did they have another number?

Was there someone else who would help us?

Was I supposed to know their number? I only knew 911.

Then I thought of it. “If you think this is a prank, why don’t you send the police to teach me a lesson? Or arrest me?”

That had to work, right?

But, no, it didn’t and I was starting to beg again when someone flung open the door to my parents’ bedroom. I gasped, terrified it was the guy with the gun, that he’d find me under the bed, on the phone with 911, and that he’d kill me, my mom, my sisters, and my brother.

From my hiding place, I couldn’t see him and it felt like I was holding my breath for an hour, but it was likely less than a second before I realized it was my mom. “Lar? Laura? Honey, are you okay?”

I scrambled out from under the bed, still holding the phone receiver, and she wrapped me in her arms and kissed the top of my head.

“Didn’t you call 911?”

“YES! I called them and I’ve been on the phone with them the whole time!”

“WHAT?”

I held up the phone. “The operator is still on the phone. She didn’t believe me and said I was pranking because I couldn’t get you on the phone!”

“What do I tell my children now?”

My mom grabbed the phone and unleashed a tirade of rage at the woman on the phone. I sort of zoned out once my mom took over but I remember her shouting that she’d been teaching her kids their entire lives to call 911 if we ever needed help — and what now?

What was she supposed to tell us now? We’d been left alone in the house with this crazed gunman for 45 minutes, thinking that the cops were going to show up at any minute. We risked our lives to call them despite the threat, because my mom had had such confidence in the police and that trust had been shattered for our whole family.

The gunman had left just before my mom came into the room. He’d taken our car, but not our lives.

Adult-verified emergency, here come the police!

I suppose the operator conceded I’d been telling the truth and finally said she’d send the police. Great, thanks so much. My mom called my dad and told him what happened and he immediately headed home from work but his office was pretty far.

Two old policemen arrived to take our statements so we told them what happened and they scribbled notes in tiny notebooks and said they’d look into it, but there wasn’t a good chance we’d get our car back — as though that was our main concern. They would try to find him but — there wasn’t much chance of that either.

They asked how he’d gotten into the house. He came in through our front door — just walked in. We always locked it — or almost always, I guess — but earlier that day when we came home, either my mom or I had missed it in the chaos of returning from swim team practice at the neighborhood pool with four hungry kids clamoring for lunch.

Would the guy come back?

My siblings were downstairs, sniffling, still terrified. After the cops closed their useless notebooks and left, we all huddled together in the basement.

Would the guy come back? Who was he? Why did he come to our house? He was coming back, wasn’t he?

We were scared all weekend that he would come back, but fortunately, he did not.

The cops were right: they didn’t catch him. A few days later they called and said they’d found him — but they had nothing to do with it — he turned himself in.

The masked gunman had driven as far south as Petersburg, Virginia, and turned himself in.

It seemed unbelievable that someone would go through the trouble of terrorizing a family for almost an hour just to give up. But the story got weirder.

Convenient access to guns at home

The masked man was our neighbor. Well, sort of-neighbor. We lived on the same street but we lived about ten houses apart and we’d never met.

And he wasn’t a man, he was a boy — only 15 years old.

This kid — only three years older than I was when I was under the bed calling for help — had gotten in a fight with his dad and decided to run away.

And he wanted a getaway car.

And he wanted a gun to get that getaway car.

He wasn’t of legal age to purchase his own weapon to terrorize his neighbors, so instead he went “shopping” in his dad’s much more accessible gun collection.

Once armed, he dressed in all black, packed his ski mask, and strolled down the street to our house — because we had the same kind of car that he used for practice with his driver’s permit.

After he turned himself in, the police told us that the gun he brought to our house wasn’t loaded. But we certainly didn’t know that when he was threatening to kill us. If someone is pointing a gun at you, at small children, at anyone, it’s best to assume it’s filled with bullets to follow through with the threat to kill.

He was sentenced to JV until he was 21.

45 minutes that changed everything

I never met him, that kid who was responsible for one of the defining moments of my childhood. But those 45 minutes transformed — and canceled — everything I’d been taught about the police. I no longer trusted that institution and couldn’t understand why we were told to call them if they didn't do anything to help people who needed them.

***

This was 30 years ago, and even though I’ve lived with the knowledge that I cannot count on the police, I know my experience is radically different and more privileged than communities of color who are actively targeted and harmed or murdered by those paid with our tax dollars.

An entire country held hostage

It’s sickening that an entire country continues to be held hostage by politicians courting the NRA’s approval and by the crazed worship of a willfully misunderstood amendment penned two hundred years ago.

Police forces around the country are funded, outfitted, and trained as though they’re going to war, yet in the face of actual danger, so many are content to do nothing, as the world saw so vividly last Friday, when it was revealed that children inside Robb Elementary school in Uvalde were calling 911 and pleading for help.

When I was begging 911 for help in 1991, we obviously didn’t have social media to talk about the incident and it never became news. A couple of months later, I wrote about it for my first assignment in 7th grade when we were asked to write about something we did over the summer. Teachers and other students were shocked, but that was the extent of it.

Over the past few decades, I’ve told several friends this story, but never wrote about it beyond class papers — until February 2016, after a policewoman in Prince William County, Virginia was killed. In one story about her death, a commenter said “And all of you cop haters that are gonna pay when the tables are turned. I hope you never need to call 911 for a police officer. You get what you give.”

I didn’t respond to the internet comment but shared this story on FB about my attempt to call 911 for help, as a little girl in that same Prince William County, Virginia — where I first discovered the police don’t respond when you need them.

“Protect and serve” who?

The myth that cops are there to “protect and serve” persists as children are still taught to call those three not-so-magic numbers. The children in Uvalde, Texas called 911 in vain and the police did nothing to stop the massacre of children not related to them.

If teachers and parents are left to protect children and others against men with guns — why do we keep devoting so much of our tax dollars to pay for excessively-armed police who have no obligation to protect anyone but themselves?

When?

When will politicians be held accountable for their lack of action protecting us from these senseless weapons? What about those who manufacture, advertise, and profit from these weapons that exist only to murder?

When will we become a country that values our children — all children — and those who work tirelessly to teach them?

When will the children of the United States be able to go to school without the horrors of active shooter drills — or active shooters?

When will parents be able to send their kids to school without worrying that every day could be the last time they see them?

Is there any hope?

When can our children go to school to learn languages and arts and sciences — not how to survive by covering themselves in the blood of an already-murdered friend in order to play dead?

Is there any hope that the United States might become a civilized country that values the lives of the living?

Is there any hope?