Violence at my doorstep

Last night I spent more time awake than I'd like. Little Man woke me up for a second time around 3am and I didn't fall back asleep until nearly 5. The longer I was awake, the more frustrated I got. I starting thinking that if it were actually happening 'now' rather than the few days previous I might have known something of such magnitude was going on.

Three gunshots. One to gain entry, one to kill her and the third to kill himself. She no longer loved him and he wouldn't have it. A sad situation of domestic violence that her two children in the apartment when it was happening. I can only pray that they were asleep when their mother was shot. But I am not so naive to think they wouldn't have seen her body lying there or his as he took some of his last breaths before he died in the hospital. A grim scene that shouldn't happen to anyone.

My bedroom is approximately 50 feet from where this happened; Sweet One's is even closer. All of us were completely unaware of the entire event that took possession of the early hours. I didn't hear any shots nor did I see lights from all of the emergency personnel who came to the scene. I am ashamed to say that I didn't notice the crime scene tape around the building until Big Love pointed it out around 930 the next morning. He only noticed it after our friend pointed it out. That's six hours after it happened.

The only time we've been aware of things going on in that building were when people were screaming at each other on the balconies facing our house or when a young woman's children were playing on the steep hill that makes up the backyard (she was no longer living there when all of this happened).

So it does make sense that it could have all passed us by. But it feels wrong that we only learned of it the way the majority of this community, by word of mouth and the newspaper. "Too close to home" and yet it still feels miles away.