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Rape in Galveston. Marsha Walker, 30, asked a woman friend to stay with her while her husband, a doctor, was out of town. She heard her two dogs barking at 2:30 a.m. outside the Walkers' second-story garage apartment in a historic section of Galveston, Texas. She was not alarmed; there were three locks on the front door, there was no back door, and the apartment was 18 ft. above ground level. But as she went to check an open window, a bare-chested black man wearing an Arab-style kaffiyeh over his head pressed a knife to her throat. He ransacked the apartment, put pillowcases over both women's heads, and raped the friend.
After that night of terror, Mrs. Walker, a magazine editor, began carrying a .45-cal. pistol. She and her husband put new locks on their windows and set up lights around the yard. When alone, she slept with all the lights in the apartment turned on. A few weeks after the attack, she returned from a brief vacation to find a makeshift ladder at one of their apartment windows and the screens ripped. But the prowler, whom Mrs. Walker assumes was the rapist bent on another attack, was heard by a friend of the Walkers' and fled as police arrived.
"Victims don't stop being victims when the police leave," says Mrs. Walker. "Violence is disabling. It changes your life for years." The Walkers have moved from the apartment, and she says, "I will never set foot there again. The anger, the dread and the fear are receding. But the rapist is still in my head. I don't think he will ever go away."
Gang Shooting in Chicago. Steven Watts had everything to live for. A 6-ft. 3-in., 212-lb. lineman, he had been named the outstanding defensive football player in Chicago public high schools and had been given an athletic scholarship by Iowa State University. He was walking home from a Friday-night dance at Julian High with several friends when a car carrying three youths passed. The trio, who were members of a black street gang, apparently thought Watts and his friends, also black, belonged to a rival gang, and began shooting. Running for cover, Watts was hit in the back by one bullet and died before he reached a hospital. Said his coach, Gregory Brooks: "He was a kid who had worked hard all his life for something and was about to get it. Then it's all taken away by some fool with a gun."
Mass Murder in Los Angeles. A waitress was fired from her job at Bob's Big Boy Restaurant in West Los Angeles because she had made a false injury claim. A few months later, at 2:30 a.m., two of her friends arrived at the café with a sawed-off shotgun, a standard shotgun and a .32-cal. pistol. After forcing nine employees and two customers into a meat freezer and ordering them to kneel facing the wall, the gunmen began shooting. Three of the victims were killed; five were wounded. Franklin Freeman Jr., 22, Ricky Sanders, 25, and Carletha Stewart, 19, the fired waitress, all black, have been charged with the murders. Identifying the men as the killers at a pretrial hearing, Waitress Rhonda Robinson, 19, a survivor of the shooting, became incoherent; she is now under a psychiatrist's care.