I saw a very bad case of child abuse tonight, and couldn't do anything about it. And it makes me ill.
After hooking up with a friend from work to pick up a 24u enclosure for my home office (I'll blog about that some other time), I shot over to the best Italian restaurant on the Eastside, Cafe Veloce, for some of their legendary fettuccine alfredo. After dinner, I was leaving the parking lot and spotted a very angry guy standing outside his Honda in a very agitated state. He tossed something that looked like a diaper into his trunk, then bent down into the back door and wailed on the child in the passenger-side child seat 5 or 6 times before slamming the door and climbing into the front seat.
“Uhh, that's not right,” I said to myself, and made my way as quick as I could across the street to the parking lot he was sitting in, and called 911 on my cell phone. Coincidentally, another Jeep started circling the area, having also witnessed the incident. While I was being tossed around from the county 911, to the Kirkland police, to the State Patrol, the guy spotted me and jumped onto the freeway. I tried to follow him, but well I was in a Jeep, and he was in a Honda sedan. And he was motivated to shake me.
By the time I had the State Troopers on the phone, I lost the guy in the growing darkness and heavy traffic and could only give them a description of the car. Which, of course, is useless. They can't go pulling over every blue Honda sedan on 405 to see if there's a bruised child in the back seat, can they?
In hindsight, which is where I spend an inordinate amount of time, unfortunately, I realize I probably had enough time to note the car's license plate number if I had known it was going to take so long to get a hold of the police, and if I had known the guy was going to bolt when he saw me. By chance, I had a notepad next to me, and a pen in my jacket, but it didn't occur to me (for reasons I can't currently fathom) to pull them out and get the license number.
I mean, I haven't been to Kirkland in months. I haven't worn this pen-laden jacket in months. And the only reason I had the notepad from the office with me was because it had the directions to my friend's house. It's like Fate put me there to catch this guy, with the tools in hand to do it. And I fumbled the handoff.
The knowledge that a child somewhere is sitting at home battered and bruised because I choked when it mattered upsets me beyond description.
People suck. When is that fucking comet going to get here?