Andrea A. Firth

Word Count 1310

Late in the summer, we meet up with my son in San Francisco for breakfast at one of our favorite spots on 9th street across from Golden Gate Park. 

From there, we walk down Nancy Pelosi Drive with plans to explore a botanical garden.

Suddenly, I hear a pop, a crunch, and patter. Ahead of me, maybe 30 feet, I see a young man in a dark hoodie with a blue bandana wrapped across his face, his arms up to his elbows inside the back window of a black van. Shards of glass glisten on the sidewalk.

Oh, he’s locked himself out of his car, I think for a fleeting second. Wait, no. I try to recalibrate what I’m seeing. Broken glass. What’s he doing? As he extracts his arms, empty-handed, and runs to the driver-side of the van—I scream.

“Hey you, stop. You. Stop it.”

We walk faster. A couple ahead on the sidewalk stops and starts to yell. 

Two hard pops. The sound of more breaking glass. The back window on the driver’s side of the van smashed. His arms, again, reaching deep into the back seat.

 “Stop. Stop.”

He wrestles to get two drawstring backpacks out through the broken window. A black SUV hovers by the front end of the van.

BLVY 163. I shout out the SUV’s license plate number trying to commit it to memory. 

The woman pulls out her phone and repeats BLVY 163. 

BLVY 163. 

We yell back and forth to each other like cheerleaders leading a chant. 

As we keep moving forward and faster, it feels like I’m watching the scene unfold in slow motion. My vision tunnels in on the boy, his back, within 10 feet … 5 feet …

My son, a step ahead, his right arm outstretched, is almost on top of him as he slides into the back seat of the SUV and slams the door.

 “I’ve got it texted in my phone,” says the woman as the SUV pulls away.

By then my husband has taken a photo of the license plate. My son dials 911. Remarkably, at that moment, a police car turns onto the street and we flag it down. The officer on the passenger side rolls down his window. The broken glass tells the story.

Black SUV. There. BLVY 163. We shout over each other as our arms and fingers point wildly toward the car still visible 30 yards ahead.

“We’ll be back,” says the officer driving and they speed off. 

I feel like an extra in a television crime drama. I look down at my watch. How much time has passed? Minutes? A minute? Seconds? Now, it feels like time stops. We wait. Pedestrians stroll by, glance sideways and walk on. We talk about what to do. Leave a note? What do we say? Call us? Is there an etiquette for this? The couple asks if we need them to stay. No. We stay because we don’t know what else to do. 

We hear tires screech. The sound lands behind my head. My heart starts to race.

A German family shows up about five minutes later. (In truth, I’ve lost track of time.) Mother, father, three sons and a girlfriend. On the third day of a three-week visit to the States. They look stunned. Mom gets teary. Dad presses his hands on either side of his head and winces. We tell them the story of the broken glass.

Don’t they know not to leave backpacks in open sight in a car? 

The thief, a boy, maybe 15. The thief. I’m calling him the thief. He must have a name. In fact, he’s a burglar. The van, a rental, has dark-tinted windows. He must have walked this street, in broad daylight, amidst dozens of people, looked in windows, and found his target. Brazen.

You hear about this sort of crime all the time, but never expect to see it happen up close. Car break-ins are rampant in San Francisco, hundreds each month, thousands each year. Described as an epidemic, an ongoing, troubling trend. Rental cars. Tourist hot spots. Residents inured to the broken glass.

The cops return as promised. They’d caught up with the SUV (the screeching tires), but it was moving too fast, driving recklessly. Too many pedestrians to risk a chase on a crowded Sunday morning in the park. “We had to back off.” 

The officers take statements. The oldest son lists the contents of the two backpacks: an iPad, Airpods, sunglasses, passports, card games. I say to my son, can’t they track the iPad? This makes me feel like I watch a lot of TV crime dramas, which I do. The iPad’s last location, seven minutes earlier, about a mile away. The cop sends a message to park facility folks to search the area. 

My son provides a description of the boy. When the cop asks the young man’s race, he seems surprised by the response. Are you sure? Yes. 

I don’t know why the cop is surprised. I don’t want this to be about race. I’m white. The German family are white. The cops are white. The boy isn’t. This is what I see. 

A friend, a writer, one with good instincts, recently said in a presentation, “White lady, don’t write your story about race. Don’t do it. I don't want to hear it or read it. Nobody does.”

Later, my husband recalls the boy as a bit round and short; I remember him slight, medium height; My son says he was taller. We can’t identify this boy. 

A local in his 30’s stops and asks what happened. He shakes his head. “I work with these kids,” he says. “The problem you have to solve is poverty.” I nod. “They work for old men who have legitimate businesses on Market Street as fronts. The kids do the dirty work for them.” Our conversation goes deep quickly, a spiraling discussion of car burglary rings, socioeconomic inequities, and urban blight. We come to a pause on a list of difficult problems without foreseeable solutions, and I say, “It’s sad.”  “Yeah. That’s what it is, sad,” he says and walks on.

As the cops continue to gather information, I pace the sidewalk. BLVY 163. The number echoes in my mind.  

I speak with the mother briefly. They are from Munich. I say we live in the suburbs where this kind of smash-and-dash crime is not common like in city. She says not so much in Munich either. But we acknowledge our privilege and the growing dichotomy between affluent and poor. We both move our hands apart to show the divide. 

This is about fear. This is about privilege. This is about social inequality. 

I feel anxious on the ride home. BLVY 163 plays on repeat. I think about the young man. Was he scared when the cops came to chase? Did he realize the iPad could be tracked? Does he know that grand theft, stealing property worth $950 or more, is a felony? Has he done this before? Did he want to do this, or did he have to do this? Will he do this again?

Later we get an email from the father. The backpacks were recovered near the park with the passports intact. They made it to Yosemite, in a new rental car, by the afternoon.

The father ends his email with, “We wish to thank you and your son and wife for the great support and sympathy you demonstrated today!... It is good to know that there are still people in this world you can count on!” 

 His sentiments are kind. We get two exclamation points. But count on for what? 

 We all go back to our lives: the couple to their walk, us to the suburbs, the family to their vacation, boys to smashing windows, old men to exploiting boys, the city to broken glass. 

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Andrea is a writer and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an Editor at Brevity Blog and cofounder of Diablo Writers’ Workshop. Andrea was a finalist for The Missouri Review's 2021 Perkoff Prize in nonfiction. You can read her work at her website and find her on Instagram.