Killers on the Loose

by Tom Scocca

I sent my younger son out the door one morning last week to catch the subway to school and it didn’t even cross my mind that there was a killer at large in the city. In our neighborhood, even. When I finally did remember, I realized I wasn’t worried at all. 

The shooter wasn’t really around at all, naturally. But this was before the police figured that out and admitted he’d skipped town almost immediately after gunning down the health insurance CEO in Midtown. Bike to cab to the George Washington Bridge Bus Station—to Altoona, Pennsylvania, apparently, if today’s arrest report pans out. The fragmentary early information put the killer’s movements squarely in our vicinity: he’d carried a bike battery beside the housing complex we walk by most days; he’d slept in the hostel right by the post office. We use the playground across the street from the hostel.

None of this frightened me personally. Every time I learn about some terrible crime or accident or misfortune, some inner actuary automatically calculates the likelihood that something like it could happen to me or to someone I know. A subway shooting, a falling tree limb, a flash flood: did it cross my path? Could it have crossed my path? How different would things need to have been?