Monday, April 12, 2010

My Wife is Bullet Proof!

Well, more likely she is "bullet resistant" to a certain degree.

This past weekend we went down to San Diego to visit her brother's family.  We got down there in the mid-afternoon and Friday.  They already had plans for dinner so we took our boys down Belmont Park to the WaveHouse for dinner.  It was pretty cool, they have a wave machine type thing that you can see from pretty much anywhere in this outdoor restaurant.  People are able to ride surf boards on this machine generated wave.

Anyway, we came back after dinner and got the boys tucked in, since they were rather tired.  Then we went out to the living room to hang out with my wife's brother and his wife.  We all were up til about 11 when me and my brother-in-law decided we were too tired to talk, or even listen for that matter, and decided to call it a night.

So, we left my wife and her sister-in-law to talk the evening away.

Now it is important to point out that their living room is on the back of their house and they have a closed in patio off the back of that.  Also, the I-8 freeway is almost literally in their backyard.  You can see it from their house.  The only barriers between the end of their lot and the freeway itself is a chain-link fence and a big concrete drainage ditch.

Well, at about quarter to 1 in the morning my wife and her sister-in-law decide to call it an evening, since our kids would be getting up in a few hours and they should probably get some rest.

As they are standing up they both hear glass shatter, or more likely pop.  My wife's sister-in-law feels this sort of shower of glass particles hit her all over her back, and my wife feels something bounce off of her leg.



Of course at this point I had already been asleep for a couple of hours, and can usually sleep through most anything.  The next thing I hear was shouting about something coming through the window, and that my brother-in-law, who was also woken up by the ruckus, finds a small bullet lying on the floor in front of the couch that my wife had been sitting on.

Though I was tired, and had just been woken up out of a pretty good sleep, I did still have the presence of mind to know that it would probably be a bad idea to just run out into the back yard to see where it came from.  So we called the police, who showed up just minutes after we called 911.

Upon concluding their initial investigation this is what we found out:  They had just prior to receiving our call they received a call about shots fired at an apartment complex across the freeway from where my brother-in-law's house is.  So basically this bullet appeared to be a stray that flew over the freeway, went through a screen on the porch, through a window in the back of their house, through the back of their entertainment center, through a picture frame, and ultimately ended up bouncing off of my wife's leg.

The velocity was enough to break the skin, but not penetrate.  And now that we are few days after the event she has a size-able bruise (about 6 inches in diameter) in addition to a scab from where the bullet hit her.  The police that investigated concluded that the bullet was probably a 9mm.


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Of course after an event like this you do take stock in a few things, especially the "what ifs" that come to mind.  Such as, what if my wife was sitting down, or nursing our youngest son when the bullet came in.  Obviously, the result of this event was not as bad as it could have been, which causes us to pause and thank God for his providence.  But it also if forces us to think about our future and what things we have considered for the perpetuation of our family if, God forbid, one or both of us are gone and we need to make sure that our children are taken care of by people we respect and trust.

This is something that responsible parents should consider every so often to make sure their plan is up to date and relevant to their situation.  This is something that we will definitely be taking some time to carefully consider.

For now we are just thankful that we are all still here, albeit a little bruised and battered.  No-one can ask for much more than that.

And let him turn from evil and do good, searching for peace and going after it with all his heart.  1 Peter 3:11

2 comments:

  1. I am glad everything is o k after all. If your looking for takers we would love to have the boys.:)

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  2. I am very thankful to God that nothing worse happened than that. Miss you guys.. We need to get together now that I am some what better.. HUGS
    Jessica

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