Chapter 1 - Before the Deputies Arrived
I was reaching across to unlock the passenger door when the shots started.
Daniel had almost reached my car.
He bent suddenly, disappeared below the window, and did not get up.
I opened my door before I understood what I was doing.
“Stay down, Mom.”
His voice came from somewhere near the front wheel.
I crouched beside the car with my phone pressed so hard against my ear that it hurt.
When the emergency dispatcher answered, I gave her Jetty Road, then Moss Landing State Beach, then both again because I was afraid I had said them wrong.
It was shortly before two on Monday morning, November 2.
I had come because my grown son had asked for a ride home from a gathering.
Until those shots, I had been rehearsing what I would say about being called out at that hour.
Now I could hear him breathing, and that was all I wanted to hear.
The dispatcher asked whether I could see anyone with a weapon.
“No.”
She asked whether anyone was hurt.
“My son is on the ground.”
Daniel shifted into view, dragging one leg behind him.
I reached toward him, but the dispatcher told me to stay behind cover and not move toward the gunfire.
There were voices farther along the road, too distant and confused for me to make out words.
Daniel pulled himself close enough for me to touch his sleeve.
“I fell,” he said.
His hand was scraped, and he could not put weight on his ankle.
I told the dispatcher what I could see rather than what I feared.
At sixty-two, after years working a medical reception desk, I knew that frightened people sometimes answered a different question from the one being asked.
Knowing that did not make me any calmer.
Headlights moved across the road beyond us.
Through the windows of my car, I caught part of a vehicle traveling away.
“I saw a car leaving,” I told the dispatcher.
I could not see its license plate or the people inside.
By the time deputies reached us, I had repeated that detail to myself several times.
An officer told us to keep our hands visible, and I lifted mine without letting go of my phone.
Other responders moved past us while someone checked Daniel.
I answered questions beside my car as they prepared to transport him.
When a deputy asked what I had seen, I said a dark vehicle had hurried away after the shots.
He asked what kind.
“I couldn't tell.”
He asked whether I had seen where it came from.
“Not exactly.”
Even then, I heard the difference between those answers and the certainty in my first sentence.
I stayed where I was told while Daniel was taken for treatment, then drove to the hospital after an officer said I could leave.
Only later, through public reports, did I learn that two people had died at the scene and another person with gunshot injuries had reached a hospital.
At the hospital, all I knew was that Daniel was alive and his injuries were not considered life-threatening.
I found him sitting against a raised pillow with a blanket pulled over his legs.
I put his phone on the bedside table and told him I had mentioned the departing vehicle.
He looked up sharply.
“Someone was getting a hurt person into a car.”
I left my hand on the table.
“Did you see that?”
“Yes.”
The vehicle I had described was already part of an official account, and I had no idea whether Daniel and I were talking about the same one.
