A Rush Hour Subway Assault: Who Dares to Care?
Nine years ago, at age 71, I made my way to a solar exhibition in downtown San Francisco during morning rush hour. I had just passed through the turnstiles of the Montgomery BART station in the upscale financial district when a shock wave struck me in the forehead with the force and precision of an attack drone.
I staggered to my knees, releasing my grip on a trekking pole I’d been using for support. Instinctively, I covered my head with my jacket while blows rained down on my hands and back. “Help!” I cried repeatedly. “Stop!” As the beating continued, all I heard was the ring of turnstiles, snippets of conversation, laughter, and the click of heels as people passed on both sides of my crumpled body.
The beating may have lasted just a few minutes, but it was long enough for me to ask myself, in desperation and despair, if anyone cared enough to stop the assault they were so clearly witnessing. As I called for help, I heard no one shout “Stop!” No one wrestled the assailant to the floor. Hard as the blows were to bear, they hurt less than the seeming reality that none of scores of passengers within view of the beating had altered their course to intervene.
And then it was over. The beating suddenly ceased. With infinite care, hands on both shoulders lifted my face from the floor and brought me gently to rest on my back. Three women gazed down at me with empathy and concern. I lay dumbstruck, my mind unable to grasp what had just happened. Then, tears welling up in my eyes, I realized these were indeed “sisters of mercy.” I couldn’t stop expressing my gratitude for their coming to my aid. “But of course,” they said, as if anyone would have done so. But of course, not everyone did.
I was rushed by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital’s trauma center. Run through a CAT scan to check for damage to my brain, I feared the worst. As I waited to be released, I began to wonder if the technicians had forgotten me. “So what did you find?” I called into the cavernous examination room. From behind a window, the technician called out, “You have a brain!” I was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. The doctor told me, “We’ll just have to wait to see the long-term effects.”
Over time I not only recovered but experienced a remarkable transformation. My assailant had struck me in the pineal glad, the well armored in the middle of my forehead between and slightly above my eyes. It seemed to have opened my heart still wider and freed my spirit to risk becoming more fully alive to the world. This small region at the front of the forehead has long been regarded as a vestigial “Third Eye,” a source of spiritual insight, or as Rene Descartes claimed, “the seat of the soul.” Modern science views it less grandly as the primary source of sleep-inducing melatonin. Whatever the case, in my highly subjective experience, the long-term impact of my assailant’s attack has been largely liberating.
But the shock that did linger — that so few had come to my aid — has not been so easily dispelled. Amid a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, I’ve struggled to reconcile three radically different expressions of human behavior. There was the random violence of a clearly deranged individual attacking a complete stranger, using my cane as a deadly weapon. Then, as I later learned from the police report, a singular man came upon the scene. He was late for work but quickly realized that dozens of witnesses were circled around me watching me being beaten, cell phones in hand. Yet none had intervened to stop the assault. Trained as an EMT, my rescuer quickly entered the circle and approached the assailant. His presence alone was enough to end the beating. He chased my assailant up the stairs and several blocks down Market Street. At 6'4", my assailant was a good six inches taller than my rescuer. Not having eaten breakfast, he found his energy flagging. But in a final desperate lunge, he tackled him and held him down till police arrived. His heroism made the TV news the next day.
But what about all those passengers who watched but did nothing to stop it, and all the others who must have seen the beating as they passed on their way to work? What did they think as they walked by? Someone else will surely take care of this. What if he turns on me? Maybe the victim did something to provoke this attack.
As a BART detective later told me, these days people rarely intervene. They’re too afraid to be drawn in. Are they feeling too besieged by their own life challenges to respond when they hear a stranger’s call for help? What if they were the ones under attack? Would they want a bystander to intervene? Do they dare to care?
Three years earlier, my daughter and I were walking back to our cart when we came upon two men beating a young woman on a deserted street corner in the hip Temescal district of North Oakland. In that moment, I suddenly recalled not having intervened forty years earlier when I had witnessed a man beating a woman on a street corner. I had approached within ten feet of the beating, hoping that my presence would cause him to pull back, but he kept on beating her. In the pre-cell phone era, there was no ready means to call for help. I reluctantly turned away. But for decades afterwards, I was haunted by my failure to intervene.
Back in North Oakland four decades later, my daughter and I witnessed this woman on her knees, being beaten in a neighborhood of residential apartments. Her cries must have been audible to dozens of people and visible to many, but none came to her aid. Vividly recalling my failure to intervene so many years earlier, in a strong, clear voice I shouted “Stop!” My daughter shouted as well. The assailants ceased their beating, looking frantically for the source of the shouting. We chased them down the street, continuing to shout, till they leapt into a getaway car.
When the police arrived, they told us we had probably saved this woman’s life. But they warned us that we’d also endangered ours. Next time, they advised us, take cover behind a wall and call them to come. But they conceded that had we done so, the time it would have taken for them to arrive might have been too long for the victim to survive.
Two years after our intervention, I met the young woman who had been attacked that day. Our connection came through a cousin who had posted a note on Facebook on the night of the attack to thank us for having intervened. It was two years before I retrieved that message, but eventually she put us together and we became friends. Yes, my daughter and I had risked more than we knew in intervening on her behalf. But my life had become immeasurably richer for having stepped forward in that crucial moment.
In the immediate aftermath of the BART attack, all I felt was despair at the thought that only one person had come to my aid. Yet since that time I’ve found reasons to be grateful for what happened that day, even to the young man who attacked me.
As a result of his assault, my assailant faced three felonies and several years in prison. I attended an early hearing for his case and met with both the D.A.’s office and his public defender. I urged them to see if he could be treated for what I suspected was a mental illness. My assailant was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He had been an exceptionally bright child, graduating from high school with aspirations to be an architect or engineer. But at age 19 he had begun experiencing hallucinations. Despite repeated efforts by his mother to get help for his illness, local mental health facilities turned him away, telling her, “We can’t admit him till he commits a crime.”
He ricocheted between home and homelessness, until a decade later, when he attacked me and thus committed an assault serious enough to thrust him into San Francisco’s criminal justice system. His public defender petitioned the judge to allow him to enter a new state-mandated “mental health diversion program” that gives inmates intensive treatment in their home communities and a gradual transition back to independent living. I urged the judge to give him a second chance. Surprised at my advocacy for treatment rather than incarceration, he approved the petition.
The hallucination that brought my assailant and me together was what he told police was “the voice of God” instructing him to take a bus from Texas to San Francisco and rescue a man under assault. Yet despite the obvious irony of his misperception, my assailant’s attack may actually have set in motion just the train of events he needed to deal with his condition. And in the process, he advanced my own evolution. His blow to my forehead was not hard enough to damage my brain but sufficient to open me to a deeper awareness of an all-too-common predicament.
I began to see the dilemma of those who through no fault of their own are unable to differentiate reality from hallucination and thus become a menace to themselves and others. And since their mental illness prevents them from finding their own way out of their predicament, it is most often their loved ones who must do what they can to find effective treatment. But the criminal justice system as it’s structured today only knows how to punish, not how to heal — to lock down rather than open up. That’s a much more difficult challenge.
The ironies abound. In the decade since my assault, I’ve emerged a more compassionate individual. I’ve even come to wonder whether the trekking pole my assailant beat me with that day acted in some strange way like a wand that gave us both what we had long sought. Life sometimes finds strange ways of giving us what we most need to become whole again.
