Let me start by saying that there are only 2 houses with Halloween decorations on our block - ours, and our neighbor's. In fact, my 9-year-old daughter has a kind of "decoration rivalry" going with the neighbor. Being Russian I am obviously superstitious, and thus a bit uneasy about the death / blood / gore symbolism that we so carelessly display... So bear that in mind.

On Monday night my husband & I were invited to a classical music concert, and we decided to take our daughter along. She didn't really want to go, but for some reason my husband insisted. I was worried that she'd get too fidgety, but it turned out ok because we let her play GameBoy (on mute, of course) and she seemed to enjoy the music.

Then afterwards, at our daughter's request we stopped for Sushi. Though we left the restaurant at around 11pm, strangely neither my hubby nor I were really worried that it was too late for Sasha on a weeknight. We were just kind of taking our time.... And with good reason, as it turns out!

When we pulled up to our block we saw that our street was closed off by the police! They wouldn't let us through, or tell us what happened. But they changed their minds after they saw Sasha in the car, and realized that we needed to get our kid into bed.

One cop told us to park our car and walk with him towards our house, being "very careful not to disturb the evidence." As we approached our home, I saw that our entire front yard was closed off with yellow police tape! They walked us around some marked evidence in our driveway (by this I mean several plastic yellow police "markers" with numbers on them, placed near puddles or other evidence items on our driveway).

When we got to the front door, two officers proceeded to explain that around 8pm that evening some gangster got shot up on our front lawn! Actually, he ran bleeding over our driveway and across the lawn, then hid behind the side of our house. Meanwhile, the perpetrators shot at him from a car in the street right by our driveway!

Our house didn't actually get hit, though there were some marked bullet casings in our driveway. But the neighbor's house did get hit. Thank goodness the guy survived, otherwise I'd seriously be thinking about selling this house! But we've definitely decided to get a fence (or brick wall?) in the front. We still have some bloody stains at the side of our house, but thankfully a fire truck hosed down our drive way when the cops were done...

So here's the weirdest part - the ONLY 2 houses on our block to be involved with this shooting, were also the ONLY 2 houses with blood & gore decorations.

Oh, and we left our automated pirate / skeleton prop on that evening. I can just imagine the shots, the guy running and bleeding past, as the prate skeleton shouts out, "Aye, who goes there! I'm waiting for youuuuuuu!"