I was walking down Kenyon Street between 14th and 13th on Friday night when two guys ran up to a Hispanic man walking directly across the street from me and started arguing with him for several minutes.. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but suddenly I saw a gun stuck in his face and I dropped it like it was hot behind the nearest car.

I heard one of guys tell him “just give it to me, now!”

As they continued arguing I quickly peeked through the car’s windows and saw them taking his backpack from .. well, his back.. The two started to run away so I crouched back down and started to duckwalk, terrified, around to the front of the car so they wouldn’t shoot me execution style for being such a wuss.

When I saw the victim run the opposite direction I popped up like a Wack-A-Mole and asked him if he was alright. He was on his cell phone, talking in Spanish. I heard him say something about “the other gang” but didn’t hear it in English context so I of course assumed the worst.

Moments later I saw a group of people walking my way. I ran over, pretended to be all butch and brave and told them what had happened. They had seen the guys running down the street and one of them had already dialed 911. One of the guys was describing everything he saw in detail to someone else. It was like Scooby freakin Doo.

One of them, a tall girl maybe 25, took the phone from her friend and was all “he was a black or Hispanic male, approximately five foot nine inches tall with dreads. He was wearing a black jacket and a blue backpack. He was armed.”

I was thinking to myself, “Self. They got all of that information from 200 feet and he was running away from them. You were 20 feet from them, directly across the street for five minutes, and all you have is wet pants.” (From the rain on the ground ^†.)

Did I mention this was a block from my house?

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^† and the urine in my shorts.