Voices Carry

My next-door neighbor and his girlfriend have been having screaming fights for weeks if not months now. It's been pretty bad, and I've been trying to figure out what the right thing to do was.

Because, I don't want to be one of those people who "doesn't want to get involved," but at the same time I want to grant people their privacy. And as long as it sounded as though only emotional violence was going on...

Still, it's been troubling me enough that I mentioned it to my therapist a week or so back. She suggested that sometimes just reminding people there are witnesses around can help to shock them out of their behavior.

About an hour ago this afternoon it moved from pretty bad to really bad. I heard lots of screaming, crying...and thuds. I opened my office window, I think in retrospect partly to remind them that there was someone here.

And heard the girl saying something I couldn't quite make out about how he had broken her...(garbled). So I called 911 once, and then a second time when I was absolutely sure she was saying he had hurt her.

I just finished giving a statement to the officer who picked up the call. He tells me she's backing up her boyfriend's statement that she (wait for it) "just fell and hit her head on a table." I overheard him telling the cop that, though he admitted there was an argument and "wrestling" going on.

That is not what the hysterical woman I could hear from my office, which adjoins the bathroom of his apartment, was saying. She was quite clearly blaming him for something that had happened to her face (how can I go to work like this?), telling him she wanted to go to the hospital, telling him she wanted to have him arrested, that she hated him and didn't trust him.

This was all over the course of several extremely highly emotionally-pitched exchanges, need I add, and not nearly so coherent. I'm just trying to get down everything I remember right now.

She also kept saying "Don't you fucking touch me!" And "Get away from me!" And he kept saying he was sorry and..."Shhhh!"

The officer informed me that she is going to have to go to the hospital.

But as I said, she apparently refuses to file charges. The cop used the term "battered woman syndrome." I don't understand the psychology of women who put up with it, I really don't.

The officer took my statement and phone number and said the man would still probably be charged regardless. The prosecutor may be contacting me for a further statement and maybe even a court appearance.

I hope that even if this doesn't lead to a successful prosecution it at least gets these two away from each other.

I just wish...I'd called sooner.