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Ambulance,
police van, and police car blocking the rue du
The two
balding men in the lower right corner and the man
This
is a not-so-elegant view of the rue du Commerce,
One of
the very few remnants of the 15th arrondissement’s |
Thursday, August 16 Today we focus on crime news. I descended in the elevator to the ground level this morning to
run my usual newspaper errand. The big
double doors to the building were open to the street, and the temporary
gardien had his bucket and mop on the floor by the door. Obviously, something had distracted
him. I thought perhaps he had to go
across the street for a moment, to the building where he normally works. As I stepped out onto the rue du Théâtre, I could see that he
was nowhere in sight. No big
deal. I was sure he’d be back soon and
that he’d secure the front doors. At the intersection with the rue du Commerce, there was an
ambulance and two police vehicles blocking the rue du Commerce, but not the
rue du Théâtre. I rounded the corner.
Pedestrians were not being blocked on that side of the street, but I
usually cross to the other side. It
was cordoned off. I saw people
standing around everywhere. What were
they looking at? Then I saw it. A small, shiny black car, of the ubiquitous
hatchback variety, up on top of one of the new planters on the sidewalk on
the other side of the street! In fact,
it had toppled a hefty granite stanchion and its wide base, and the front end
of the car was way up on top of the upturned granite base! The car was somewhat damaged, and its hatchback was popped open. How on earth could it have been lifted up there? I slowly made my way through the crowd and went to the kiosque
at the park to buy my papers in a very congenial, polite transaction with the
vendor, a man who looks like he should be teaching philosophy at the
Sorbonne. When I arrived back at the apartment building, the guardien was
mopping the floor of the porte cochere. We exchanged greetings, and I tried to step
over the area he’d just mopped. Back in the apartment, Tom and I went out on the balcony to look
at the action below in the intersection.
Tom didn’t stay long, but I did stay until I could tell more about
what was going on. The pompiers (firemen,
who are also the medics who run the ambulances in the city) were speaking to
someone in the back of the ambulance.
The discussion was growing more heated, and the head medic started to
raise his voice and gesture toward the police van parked just behind him. He was clearly telling the “victim” in the
ambulance that if he would not let the pompiers
take him to the hospital, then he was going to have to go with the police. This argument went on for a little while, then finally a large
black man in a bright, pale orange unbuttoned shirt and dark slacks comes out
of the ambulance and quickly enters the police van. Something about the way the man walked made
me think he is probably a foreigner.
The French have a certain way of moving. The police walked with him, but did not
handle him at all. No need. There were three semi-scruffy looking guys who’d been standing
with the police and the pompiers at the intersection. I thought they were perhaps witnesses or
friends of the black man, and wanted to be sure he was being taken care
of. But after the man moved himself into
the police van, first one of the semi-scruffy men popped into and out of the
police van, then another one did. I
was surprised that the police let them do that. Then suddenly, the three semi-scruffy men took off running. Oh no, I thought. Had they discovered that the police knew of
some crime they’d committed, and were taking off before they could be
arrested? The three popped into a
ubiquitous little faded gray hatchback and pulled out onto the rue du Théâtre. Then they turned on their siren and their
flashing light in the windshield. They were undercover cops!
The rue du Commerce has become such a busy, fancy little shopping
street, that I think the police are patrolling it with undercover cops to
handle any purse-snatchings (very, very rare in this neighborhood) or other
petty crimes. They must have been the
first on the scene. The pompiers left, and
then just the two police vehicles remained, blocking the rue du
Commerce. One policeman came from the
direction of the wrecked car, carrying a small black satchel and a box
containing some neat looking leather zippered kits of some kind. Another policeman was wheeling a large
suitcase. The box and satchel went into the police car, to be taken and
searched, I’m sure. The suitcase was
placed in the police van where the large man was now sitting up against the
back door. It looked like he might
have been placed in handcuffs. The
police finally left. A wrecker still
needs to come and collect the wrecked car from its perch. A bit later, when the gardien brought our mail to the door, he
mentioned the car wreck to me. I said
it was very strange. He said it was a
problem of too much speed. When I was on the sidewalk on Commerce, I’d seen a large truck,
of the sort involved with cleaning the streets, that had been stopped across
from the wrecked car in a delivery zone.
I think what may have happened is that the truck had started to pull
out of the delivery zone, into the one and only lane of the street, and the black
car was zooming down the street, going way too fast. When it swerved to avoid hitting the truck,
it somehow went up onto the planter and was stopped by toppling the
stanchion. Thank heavens for the new
planters and stanchions. Otherwise, I
think the car would have gone zipping down the sidewalk, crashing into
pedestrians, like me, along the way. Tom and I have seen speeding cars swerve onto sidewalks
before. But usually it is at night,
after dinner, when some people who’ve had too much wine are out there behind
the wheel. Other crime news . . . On Sunday night, as Carolyn, Doug, Tom and I were taking care of
travel details for Carolyn and Doug at our apartment, an Italian visitor
named Sergio Vantaggiato was not far away, catching the number 6 elevated
métro at the Bir Hakeim station on the
boulevard de Grenelle. He was with his
companion, his brother, and his 8-year-old son. This is the same métro line, only one
station away, from where Tom had his arm broken by a pickpocket in August
2000. The pickpocket also knocked Tom
to the concrete floor by using his head to punch Tom in the jaw. Fortunately, Tom didn’t quite loose
consciousness and his glasses were not broken. He only required outpatient treatment. Sergio was a very popular sportscaster with the Italian Télérama
cable station in southern Two guys deliberately bumped into and jostled Sergio to remove
the knapsack from his back. In so
doing, it seems that they knocked him down the stairs. Sergio suffered head trauma. He never awakened. He was declared brain-dead the next day,
and the family and medical personnel let him go peacefully. There were no security cameras in that part of the station. I don’t understand that. Métro stairways and escalators are prime
places for pickpockets and thieves to tackle their targets. In the case of Tom’s attackers in 2000, the
security cameras had been knocked awry so they just pointed at the blank
wall. Someone with a long pole had to
do that. And why didn’t the RATP personnel attend to it right away? I remember being very suspicious about
that. Sergio reportedly had nothing of particular value in his
knapsack. And now half of |
