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Saturday, May 31, 2003
 
. . . These are Their Stories
It had all the makings of a Law & Order moment.

2:30 a.m.:
Wife nudges husband awake. "There's someone at the door."

Husband is half-awake. Upon hearing the knocking for himself, he gets up and looks out the window but isn't really looking at anything.

"Who is it?" the wife asks.

The husband stumbles out of the bedroom without answering, not even looking at the clock to see what time it is (he figures it's about 6 o'clock). He's wearing his underwear and a Pittsburgh Steelers t-shirt. He goes to the door, doesn't bother looking through the peephole or turning on the porch light (a bird has built a nest in it), and opens the door. A flashlight beam illuminates the concrete outside.

"It's the police." The cop shines his flashlight through the plexiglass storm door to see that the husband isn't wearing any pants. "Does a white woman live here?"

"Yeah." The husband has pushed open the storm door. He confirms that it does appear to be a police officer. "I'll go get her." He scurries back to the bedroom, where his wife is sitting upright.

"It's the police. He asked if a white woman lives here."

"Wh . . ? Get my pants. They're in the bathroom."

The husband retrieves the bed pants and gives them to his wife, who quickly puts them on and goes to the door. The husband stays in the bedroom for a few moments. When he rejoins his wife, the cop is checking all the closets and bedrooms for another person that could be hiding (or that the couple could be hiding from him). He explains that there was a call that a woman was on the street in front of our house yelling "No!" . . . or possibly "Joe!" The couple tell him that they hadn't heard a thing. The cop radios in that the couple don't know anything and that the wife is wearing different clothes than those described by the dispatcher.

"I'm sorry to get you guys up in the middle of the night," the cop says by way of apology. And then he leaves.

The couple go back to bed. The baby slept through the whole ordeal.

"I just knew someone was dead," the wife says, "when there was a knock on the door at 2:30 in the morning."

They lie awake, perhaps wondering if they're going to find a body in their yard in the morning. Just like before the opening credits of that popular NBC cop/lawyer show.