Unhappy new year
There were fewer complaints of celebratory gunfire, but people were still in harm’s way
The new year announced itself to Robin Brydie’s household with a pop of gunfire and a poof of drywall dust. • “Hit the floor!” her boyfriend shouted. • Everyone in the house did: Brydie, her boyfriend, her 5-year-old grandson and her daughter, who is 7 months pregnant. • “She crawled into my bedroom on her stomach, her arms and stomach, like she’s in the military,” said Brydie, 52. • It was 12:10 a.m. on Jan. 1. • Brydie called Columbus police, filing one of 182 reports of shots fired
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between 9 p.m. on Dec. 31 and 3 a.m. on Jan. 1. More than 100 of the reports came between 11:57 p.m. and 12:20 a.m., records show.
The previous year, 230 reports of gunfire during the same six-hour span had heralded the arrival of 2014. There were 240 reports as 2013 dawned, police said.
Some of those reports might have been fireworks mistaken for gunfire, but it’s likely that even more gunshots go unreported, particularly in neighborhoods where the sound is common, police said.
Gunfire is still common enough on New Year’s Eve that patrol officers are advised to seek shelter, if they have no priority runs pending, for the five minutes before midnight and 15 minutes after.
But police were heartened by the reduction in calls this year and hopeful that their educational push to reduce celebratory gunfire might be having the intended effect.
In the buildup to New Year’s Eve, police messages began popping up on Clear Channel billboards throughout the city. Posters went up in city recreation centers, and church pastors spread the word to their flocks that the practice is a tragedy-in-waiting.
Cmdr. Robert Strausbaugh, who oversees the police zone that includes the Near East Side, was beyond relieved when the new year arrived with no reports of injuries or fatalities in Columbus from celebratory gunfire.
Ten years ago, a 16-year-old girl was killed in her South Side home by errant New Year’s Eve gunfire.
Tragedy struck elsewhere this year. One man was killed by a falling bullet in his Houston driveway while watching fireworks with his wife. In Sacramento, Calif., a 23-year-old woman inadvertently was shot and killed by her boyfriend while he celebrated in an apartment-complex parking lot.
“It’s just stupid to fire a gun in the air for celebratory purposes,” Strausbaugh said. “You know (the boyfriend in California) feels terrible for taking another life, and it all could have been avoided.”
There were close calls in Columbus.
Staff at the Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry on Greenlawn Avenue reported at 12:15 a.m. that a bullet came through a skylight. A neighbor of Brydie’s reported a bullet smashing through her picture window just before midnight. And Brydie’s boyfriend had just exited the bathroom when the bullet entered, piercing the shower stall and linen closet before ricocheting to a stop under the sink.
Police think that someone riddled the vacant North Side house next to Brydie’s with bullets. One bullet traveled clear through, out the south wall and into her home.
“We’re lucky we’re not planning a funeral,” she said. “It really could have been an ugly situation.”
She moved into her Hanna Drive house in July from Cordell Avenue in South Linden.
“I’m used to gunshots, but I never had a bullet enter my home,” she said. “I get an eerie feeling every time I go into my bathroom now.”
The Rev. Frederick LaMarr, pastor of the Family Missionary Baptist Church at 996 Oakwood Ave. on the South Side, was one of the pastors who agreed to preach about the dangers. The reach of the church in African-American communities can be long, LaMarr said, and he expects that his message filtered beyond his church’s walls, carried home and preached again by parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles.
About eight pastors agreed to preach on the topic during the recent holiday season. Police hope to persuade 10 times as many to do the same as this year draws to a close.
“We’re looking for no gunfire,” LaMarr said. “We didn’t reach that, but when we don’t have any incidents, we still count that as a success.”
Clear Channel placed the Columbus police message into any unsold slots on its automated billboards last year, and the message appeared thousands of times, Strausbaugh said. He hopes to broaden the program this year, perhaps with messages on buses or other public transportation.
Because the practice of celebratory gunfire is entrenched in many areas, the challenge is getting people to pause and think, he said. It’s not so much that they weigh the risks and decide they are minimal — it’s more likely that they don’t give it much thought at all.
“It is our hope that our little message will subliminally get into the back of their heads,” he said. “That’s hard to measure, but that’s what we hope for.”