the story from the park

I was thinking about this story from the main page of NY Times. In the story, which is a true one, a woman took her dog for a walk at a park in Brooklyn. A guy at the park attacked her and her dog, and her dog, sadly, died from its wounds a few days later. Flash forward to the present, and she’s trying to get the guy arrested, with help from cops and local conservatives and liberals, but he’s still at-large.

The story interests me for a couple reasons, first of all because I live near Prospect Park. Like about 1–2 million other people in Brooklyn, I live near the park, though I actually live quite close to it. For the time being, I’m just a few minutes away, and knowing what sweet privilege this is, I try to go there as often as I can. I go almost every day. I walk there, and ride my bike, and I almost always take pictures because I think it’s such an amazing, beautiful place.

To be clear, I don’t have a dog, so I’m largely ignorant about the dog scene. But I do spend a lot of time in Park Slope, the neighborhood along one side of the park, having worked and still working service jobs there, and so I converse with sometimes dozens of people each day in this neighborhood. And for what it’s worth, I had never once heard of this story about the woman and the guy and her dog until I read the Times article a few days ago. I’d never heard anyone, dog owners nor anyone else, abuzz about this story from the summer. That said, it’s interesting to me and it seems important.

It’s important, in part, because the discourse around the story has brought to light a number of truly unhinged people online saying insane things, which they would almost certainly also say in person, which is that they want this guy locked up, that they don’t feel safe in the neighborhood “anymore,” that we need more cops, more, that personal safety and freedom (except that guy’s) are more important than basically anything else, and so on. It’s sincerely disturbing, and it makes me feel uncomfortable to know people like that are so close to me while I sleep, exercise, work, study, and go about my days.

But I want to bring this back to the woman and her sweet dog for a moment, because I think that’s all gotten a little bit lost. First of all, it’s awful that she lost her dog, and that he seems to have suffered. It makes me sad. And what comes up for me when reading the story is how I’m also sad at what seems to be eclipsed in the telling. I’m worried about the start of the story, when she first encountered the guy, with her dog, and things feel blurry and she tried to get away but there was no room. The thing is, that park has plenty of room. That’s why people like it there, because there’s plenty of room for everyone, and the paths are wide and the fields are open. It’s easy to take a picture there with no one in it. So it makes me sad that with all that said, there’s still apparently so little space for this woman to feel regret that she took her dog so close by someone who needed a wide berth. She didn’t deserve to be attacked, just like none of us really deserve to access a park whenever we want, nor to have or do or be most things, I guess. Maybe I’m projecting; but I think it’s awful and tragic that for whatever reason, she walked so close to someone who ended up hitting her dog, and also that it seems there’s not a lot of satisfaction or healing to be found in discussing that fact.