Murder in the Green

Apparently my neighborhood has a murder rate. Yes, that's right, my yuppy as can be neighborhood has hosted a violent crime. Let's discuss. So, last week sometime when I was returning from the gym, there was police tape blocking off a section of road at the end of the pedestrian walkway from the tube, where it goes on to the regular streets. The police seemed to be finishing up doing some survey work of a small section of road. For some reason I was thinking this had been Tuesday, but now I think it may have been Monday. So I had assumed someone had gotten hit by a car or something, and sort of filed it away.

This week some signs have appeared en route to the tube station from my house. Some big yellow metal signs with the headline MURDER. Below is a quick rundown basically as follows "Between Sunday 20th January and Monday 21st January shots were fired inside a home on Maur road and a male was forced into a vehicle and kidnapped". The sign is an appeal from the Metropolitan Police looking for witnesses, giving a phone number to call in case any of us noticed anything at the time. After briefly discussing where this Maur Road was, we saw that Saint Maur Road is the first road you hit upon leaving the pedestrian walkway from the tube. Aka, where the police tape had been last week.

If you look at google maps, you can see that Maur Road is not that far from my own street, about 6 streets away, running parallel to my own. Now how any sort of crime, let alone one of this magnitude, could be committed on this street is beyond me. For one thing it's nicer than mine, lined completed with two-store bricked town houses that are all cute and neat as can be, complete with trees along the sidewalk. I've walked down in a few times when picking up my dry cleaning after work. It's basically the complete opposite of sketch. Given this level of niceness, I must say that I am not really at all worried that I'm in a dangerous area. In fact I'm still pretty sure it's one of the safer areas in town. So instead of being wary of this crime, I must admit I am really just perplexed.

Despite the title on the sign and the run-down, I'm still not quite sure what has happened. So we know that an incident seemed to occur inside a home, so it wasn't on the street. We don't know if this was a crime between strangers or acquaintances, so we don't know how people wielding guns got into the house. Or quite frankly, as guns are essentially illegal in this country, how anyone got them. We don't know if someone was shot within the house, or if it only involved this man who was apparently kidnapped. We don't know if things have been resolved or what the motives behind the crime was. Was there a ransom situation? Was illegal activity involved? Disgruntled employees? Or just some random thing? I spent at least two minutes looking for something in the news about it yesterday but couldn't find anything. This was probably because it was week old news, but still. I'm hoping for a bit of closure.

Anyways, despite the crime I don't want people to think less of Parsons Green. If anything it just sort of goes to show that things of this nature can happen anywhere.