Laura keeps talking about how we live in the hood, but still:

On September 24, 2004 at approximately 10:26 PM, Mountain View Police Department responded to a report of a shooting in the ___ block of _. __________ ___. near ______ ______. A group of Hispanic male pedestrians were fired upon by the occupants of a vehicle southbound on __________. One of the pedestrians, a male in his late teens, was shot in the chest and subsequently declared dead at the Stanford Hospital.

This is quite literally right across the street from where I live. I didn’t know about it at the time, but one of my neighbors mentioned it to me in the resident center the next day, and Saturday evening I noticed a lot of people hanging around lighting candles on the street as I drove by. The police department’s press release notes that “an impromptu shrine has been set up by family and friends of the victim,” which I’m assuming is what I saw.

On the radio just now, I heard an announcement asking anyone with information on this particular incident to call the Tip Line. I’m always surprised at how much infrastructure Mountain View has, actually. It doesn’t feel like a large enough city to have enough crime to need a Tip Line. I guess it’s a pretty big city, though: 72,000 residents in 12 square miles. We have five fire stations, too, and an excellent park system. Laura and I go out to Shoreline Park every so often, and recently we biked down the Stevens Creek Trail—I’ve been driving on Stevens Creek Drive for years, but it never occurred to me that there might actually be an actual Stevens creek, which is a really nice ride.