The Dirt Field

I had a friend meet me at my work last Friday evening so we could get dinner at one of Bethesda’s many restaurants. After settling on a sushi place several blocks from my building, we stopped by the parking garage where she’d left her car to add some quarters to the parking meter. On our way out of the garage, we passed a group of teenage boys who offhandedly warned us, “Watch out, that lady is crazy.”

That lady turned out to be a short, stocky Asian woman wearing a long, flowing skirt and sporting a rather unflattering buzz cut. She was about twenty feet behind the boys, walking towards us and speaking to herself quite loudly in another language, like one of those homeless men who endlessly shout to everybody around that the lord is coming. While I enjoy attracting the attention of mentally unhinged pedestrians as much as the next girl, we were on our way to a relaxing dinner, so we passed her without acknowledgment or any sense of real concern for our safety.

Just a few yards past the woman, though, we made eye contact with a small group of people, one of whom looking incredibly flustered. “That woman just held a big knife up to me,” she gasped. “She’s crazy!”

It started pouring rain at that moment, so my friend and I ducked under an awning to watch the psychotic woman who had come to a stop in front of the parking garage we’d just exited. By then, she was yelling vehemently while stabbing a large metal sign over and over again. In case this is in any way unclear, I’ll reiterate: a woman, who looked like a tiny, angry refugee from the Tibetan Freedom Concert, was having a meltdown and stabbing a metal sign with a large knife.

Needless to say, we were sufficiently alarmed.

The noise of the knife clanging into the sign repeatedly drew the attention of a number of bystanders, none of which deterred the woman. She only stopped attacking the sign briefly, in order to divert her attention to the vacant car parked nearby. With no hesitation whatsoever, she stabbed her knife into the car’s taillights and rear windshield several times before returning to the sign. I guess she really wasn’t a fan of the sign.

Within several minutes, police cars came screeching onto the scene, surrounding the crazy lady. The officers leapt out of their cars with their guns drawn and screamed at her to drop her weapon. Like any good psychotic, however, she not only did not drop her weapon or stop after being tasered, but also ran at the nearest police car, stabbing the driver’s window and then the taillights. The quick thinking officer behind the wheel gunned the car in reverse, slamming into the woman and shoving her a good twenty feet before she dropped to the ground under the moving car. Her head was two seconds from being under the wheel, and for a moment I was certain that I was about to see my first head-under-a-car-tire scene, one which would have left me completely disinterested in eating ever again. The officer stopped in the nick of time, though, and her head remained intact. Still psychotic, but intact.

The woman was unconscious by then, and laid motionless under the back of the police car as the officers surrounded her. They kicked her knife away, cuffed her, and hauled her over to the side of the road just feet from where we were standing. She wasn’t visibly bleeding or damaged, but was most certainly not feeling her best, and an ambulance came to transport her shortly thereafter.

And that was it. Somewhat in shock from the whole experience, we started walking to the restaurant, discussing the insanity of what we’d just witnessed. It was then that my friend suddenly said, “You know, those guys could have warned us a little better. All they said was that she was crazy. You’d think they could have said something more effective, you know, like, THE FACT THAT SHE WAS ARMED.”