Lani's Blog

What Would You Have Seen?

If this had happened in the D.C. area, it might have been a case for Bones and Booth. Or if it had taken place in Las Vegas, Grissom might have been called. But this is real life and it happened in L.A.


Here’s the story as reported by the A.P press:





LOS ANGELES —  Residents of a Southern California apartment complex say they saw a lifeless body slumped on a neighbor's patio, but didn't call police because they thought it was part of a Halloween display.


Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead since Monday. (Oct 12, 2009)


Cameraman Austin Raishbrook, owner of RMG News, told the Los Angeles Times he was at the scene in Marina del Rey Thursday when authorities arrived. The 75-year-old Zayed was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment with a single gunshot wound to the eye.


A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department investigator says the case is an "apparent suicide."


Raishbrook says neighbors told him they noticed the body Monday "but didn't bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy."








Some poor soul felt life was worthless, couldn’t go on and decided to end it all. Are we so desensitized to the gruesome, that a suicide looks like art? This story made me ill. I wanted to rail against Halloween, violence on TV and in movies. I wanted to warn against the dangers of video games and images from the TV news. I wanted to shake my fist and yell at the neighbors, “Are you stupid?! Are you unfeeling, uncaring misanthropic Neanderthals?”





I wanted to do all those things until the small still voice in my heart of hearts asked, “And what would you have done?”  And I felt myself cringe. I wish I could say I would have been the one who would have called 911 when I heard the shot. (Why didn’t someone do that?) Or seeing Mr. Zayed’s body on the balcony, called the police. But I don’t know if that’s true. More likely, I would have been like everyone else, looking neither left nor right, up or down, but straight ahead tending to my own concerns.





If I did happen to glance up to the third floor patio, would I have seen Mr. Zayed or a Halloween display? It’s about context. I’ve seen dead bodies in hospitals and I’ve seen graphic Halloween displays. I don’t expect to see a suicide but I do expect to see a mangled dummy in Oct on a patio.





The real tragedy is Mr Zayed felt so alone he saw suicide as his only option. And the fact his neighbors never missed him.