Just Another Night Riding the 22
It was a Friday night and I was on my way home from work. I had just gotten off BART at 16th Street and walked over to the bus stop to catch the 22. At first, everything seemed normal. Lots of people were begging for change, people were talking on their cell phones, other were people standing around waiting for the bus and tons of people were walking by in the general area. It seemed like another normal night at 16th and Mission.
As I waited for the 22, I heard some rowdiness over yonder, behind me. I looked over my shoulder and I saw that there were some guys goofing around with each other. They weren’t yelling. Just bumping into each other and being loud.
A few seconds later, these guys walked around to the front of the bus shelter where I was standing. There were three of them. Three Hispanic guys who spoke only Spanish. They were all over the place. One guy was even wandering in the street. I noticed that each of them had a bottle of tequila in their hand.
Suddenly, a black guy came out of nowhere and started speaking broken Spanish to these guys. The black guy walked in the street a bit and around the bus shelter, in plain sight of me, but out of view of the cameras located at the intersection. I’m not sure what triggered it, but one of the Spanish-speaking guys must have pissed off the black guy. This black guy was a young kid with nothing to lose. He seemed to be by himself and started talking mad shit to these guys in Spanish. It almost seemed like he was trying to egg them on into a fight. As soon as the black guy walked right in front of me, he lifted up his sweatshirt to show the fact that he had a gun in his drawers. Everyone standing in the bus shelter bolted out of the area, including myself. The other guys saw the gun, but continued talking back to the black guy. It was like the threat of the black guy having a gun and using it didn’t even phase them. These guys were obviously intoxicated.
