Bad Situation

I am relaying this incident that happened to my son a few months ago. Luckily the situation turned out ok but could have gone very wrong very quickly.

My son was just finishing up his last quarter of medical school. As a part of his degree he must complete a specified number of volunteer hours. The school had a specific task that that they were having a hard time to get a volunteer for so they thought my son would be perfect for this particular assignment. The assignment was delivering food to elderly people that were unable to easily get out of their houses for themselves. The area in particular was a low income housing in a predominantly black neighborhood. ( I hate using the divisive language we are forced to use by our current government leadership, I truly feel we are all Americans but to illustrate the situation I guess I need to do this). My son is 6’4", 260lbs. He is not a body builder but he is a very muscular 260lbs. He pulled up to the housing development and was trying to find the home he had to deliver the food. As he started to get out of the car he saw 6 men watching him. They were all wearing clothing that had BLM and that type of trash on their shirts. They started screaming at him and calling names, and telling him he better get out of their neighborhood. My son is not easily intimidated and he decided that he could quickly get to the home, deliver the food, and get back to his car and that they may be loud and boisterous but he really didn’t think they would come after him. He knocked on the persons door, an elderly man came to the door, he was so incredibly appreciative and told my son he had requested food assistance before but everyone was scared to go into this neighborhood. He told my son that he just couldn’t thank him enough.
My son then headed back to his car. At this time the 6 men started to head to my sons car. They then surrounded the car screaming and calling him names and threatening him. My son had recently purchased a 9 mm pistol and had it in the car. He was hoping they would just let him leave without incident but that option was dissipating quickly. He then made a decision to pull out his pistol, he inserted the magazine and racked the gun. He then set it down on the seat of his car. He made sure they could see his movements. At this point the group backed off and my son was able to quickly drive away.

His thought process was he had to deliver the food. It was his assignment to help him graduate and someone really needed it. He didn’t think they would attack but they surrounded his car. If they were willing to confront a man that was the size of my son, then what else would they do. He knew pulling the gun out could also go very negatively if one of them was carrying but he felt that was his only option to get out of the situation safely. I thank God that he was able to leave unharmed and that no one else was injured.

It is sad in todays volatile world that trying to help an elderly man get food could turn into such a potentially negative situation. If he had not had the gun with him, I don’t know what would have happened.

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@DS-1 @Alexander8 @Karacal @Jason192 @Johnnyq60 @Shamrock @G.Washington @mattm @Mike164 @BeanCounter
:us::us: 45IPAC @BRUCE26 @Timothy94 >> lucky is right. Red flags I see.

  1. left firearm in car.
  2. no clip in gun
  3. showed firearm.
  4. bring the people with you to the project so they could stop being & teaching
    People to do stupid things ( dangerous things )
    Got away lucky but what’s wrong with that picture picture , really :question::question::question:
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Glad he’s ok & a grad. Just one question did he tell the clowns why he was there?

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Race & Ethnicity aside! Race and ethnicity are used to categorize certain sections of the population. In basic terms, race describes physical traits, and ethnicity refers to cultural identification. Race may also be identified as something you inherit while ethnicity is something you learn.

If this was a “volunteer” mission I’d let people know there are places I won’t go!

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  1. left gun in car >> they could have easily taken the car from him. Take car = gun in car. If they didn’t have iron they did now.
    2)if he had to use the iron he would have lost life saving time to load it. once he showed the iron & loading it that could have been grounds for the crowd to use deadly forest and shoot him up like Bonnie and Clyde without Bonnie.
    Also just by showing the iron the way he did it could have brought criminal charges
    For brandishing a iron in a threatening way. Lesson learned stop doing stupid things because someone stupid told you to. School should be making you smarter PS: don’t get smart with me.
    :us::us::us:
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First off, his noble task means nothing to the group of thugs on the street, they simply don’t care. That said, one of the first tenants of self defense is “don’t be there”. Six guys standing on the corner eyeing you is the kind of red flag one should heed. Up until a month or so ago, in Utah, he would not have legally been able to brandish/use a fire arm in this situation. We just passed a law that if a mob circles your car AND assaults you you can take serious action. Looking up stream, who ever sent him into this area carries a lot of the fault here, they knew or should have known.

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Did he, or those that sent him there know it’s that kind of neighborhood? If so, he shouldn’t have gone alone. I get the nobility of the task, but, self preservation is high on the list 99% of the time.
As others pointed out, the problems of unloaded gun, brandishing, etc. I’m glad it didn’t end bad, and the person in need received some help. Please encourage your son to rethink how he goes about these situations.

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If I had been your son I would have never gotten out of the car. Circle the neighborhood and return later when they leave. Just me seeing them there would have caused me to load my firearm and conceal it somewhere on my person. Or even avoid the situation at all cost. No matter how noble a task it was it is not worth getting assaulted or losing your life.

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I’m with you 100% from the beginning. Just adding that there are places I won’t go!

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Sadly, I’m very irritated by the story. A firearm in your car, unloaded is useless. What if they didn’t let him reach his car? What if they stabbed him on his way to his car? There are so many possibilities and frankly all he did was confirm they need to carry themselves so some dumb guy can’t intimidate them while uselessly antagonizing a passerby.

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What neighborhood is NOT that kind of neighborhood today?
These men that surrounded the volunteer, they are devils, demons. This is their motivation. I can appreciate all comments about shortcomings, but somehow I think this was mostly a test of restraint, rather than technicalities.

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Kudos to your son for getting himself out of the situation without harm to himself or others.

There’s enough comments about how the situation could have been avoided or improved.

One question I have is whether he called the police to report the incident and his actions. If he didn’t, he could have left himself open to being reported to the police for brandishing his weapon.

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Not sure what neighborhoods everyone here frequents but in my personal experience, most neighborhoods are still pretty safe these days. Yes there are places that aren’t but I’m sure that even in the worst of cities there are plenty of neighborhoods you can walk through without issue as long as you keep your eyes open for the occasional trouble makers.

But schools and and non profits etc. should not be sending people into situations like this without training on how to recognize and handle these situations. I would have just left under these circumstances in the currently politically charged atmosphere. But even this situation likely could have been deescalated with a little verbal tact.

Agree with other comments that the firearm should have been carried in a ready state. Though that may not have been allowed due to local regulations and likely as a condition of the project he was taking part on?

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Agree with this in general though in some anti gun places the police might consider this as self reporting a brandishing situation. If I did call I would try to just report the threats made by the group.

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It is the right course of action, and it is what any trainer would tell you. And yet …

this resonates somehow.

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Does resonate for sure. They need to get locals involved in the delivery somehow. Would be a lot easier for people from the neighborhood to navigate the streets. Maybe instead of giving away free money to everyone wether they need it or not we could pay some folks who need a job to deliver food to those in need?

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Chicago at a glance!

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Based on the news reports I would have assumed the murders were almost city wide. Looks like even in Chicago there are many places where you can expect not to get killed while walking to someone’s door.

I would likely have to drive hundreds of miles to find anywhere even remotely as dangerous as Chicago. Fortunately for most of us these war zones are few and far between in the US. Though I am sure thanks to our biased media people living in other countries think everywhere in the US is as out of control as those high crime neighborhoods in Chicago.

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Exactly. I drove to Aurora in March to buy a truck. I never felt in danger. Normal people, going about their business. People of different races, all saying good afternoon/how’s it going at the gas stations/restaurants. It’s concentrated in certain areas in Chiraq.

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A good friend, since passed, LEO put me on to this map from www.heyjackass.com.

My wife, also passed, took me on a cemetery crawl to take pictures of her family graves as part of her Ancestry project.

When I told where we were he was aghast over the danger we were in.

Luckily we did it in one trip to the red zone!

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