Purse Snatching

I witnessed a purse snatching in downtown North Platte. It was either four or five years ago. Two guys came running out of a restaurant with a purse and two screaming women were right behind. It was the petite blond woman they had stolen the purse from. They must have simply walked passed their table and grabbed it. I had met the victim somewhere, a party or maybe an old job I had. She screamed "help" and I remember my feet started to shuffle in a runnish sort of way towards the scene. I don't know if I intended to help or not. It doesn't matter. The thieves jumped into their car and rocketed down the street. They were ten blocks down the street within seconds, and I was nearly a block away from all of this. I couldn't have possibly gotten there in time to, do what?

I told my friend Chad about the incident a couple of days later. He asked me why I didn't help. "I would have" he said. Chad had held a job for a total of one year out of the previous six. He supported himself through the junk-for-drugs trade, which he gladly worked both ends of. Mostly though he was supported by a girlfriend who had an associate's degree and a teller's job at North Platte's First National Bank. She was twenty, but considered it beneath herself to hunt down somebody who was twenty-one and willing to buy alcohol for minors every night. So she had Chad. She worked and studies and told Chad to get a job so that they could get a bigger house. He smoked pot and traded twenty-year-old bikes for meth and watched TV and bought her beer and pot. Their relationship works as well as anyone else's.

Chad had unusual notions os self-defense. His house was full of valuble and/or illegal things, so he was rightfully worried about break-ins. Plus he liked Crystal. He once believed that his house was being bugged by the FBI. We hangers-on played along, shouting "FUCK (officer so-and-so)" while our drug deals went on unabated. Chd thought he had the legal right to shoot any intruder for any reason as long as he didn't have a back door. So he sealed the back door of the house he was renting with wood, nails, and concrete. Nebraska's self-defense clauses, as in most states, are vaguely worded, something about resorting to lethal force as a last resort, typical boilerplate. There's nothing at all about a back door, back doors are simply irrelevent. Back doors do not legally exist. I tried to explain this to Chad but he didn't believe me. Lots of people still believe in the back-door clause. It's like God that way, it really doesn't matter if the law is real or not. The fact that people think it is creates the same effect.

So Chad said he would have rushed to the aid of the purse-snatching woman, and nobody
who knew the man believed him. He was counting on that. It was subtle nonsense. He wasn't claiming to be a Vietnam Vet or that he had a million dollars worth of coke hidden somewhere. It didn't sound ridiculous on the surface, just to those of us who knew that he liked his Bud Light mixed with V-8 for breakfast. So he said he would have helped her and everyone knew it was nonsense and he knew we wouldn't call him on it.