This sounds so odd to say, but early last morning there was a murder at my apartment complex. What’s even stranger, and more disturbing, was that I heard someone getting killed and didn‘t even realize it.
According to the Davis Police, Dennis Thrower, a 35 year old hairdresser, who lived at the other end of my apartment complex, got into an argument with someone (or some people) at around 5:50 am. The argument started to get more angry and intense, prompting someone to call the police. While the police were en route, several gunshots rang out from his apartment, leaving Thrower dead in the entrance. The suspect(s) then got away, leaving behind a trail of blood that ran down the stairs and out to the nearby road, where the blood ended. The Davis Enterprise cover this story pretty well here.
Now this is especially eerie for me because I heard those gunshots. They woke me up, but only momentarily. I remember distinctly hearing two or three pops, but that’s all they were--pops. I thought they were at most someone shooting firecrackers in some other part of the neighborhood, or remotely maybe someone’s tires getting slashed somewhere in the distance. All they sounded like were distant pops, not gunshots. But I was too tired to think any more of it, and went back to sleep.
When I woke up again, I looked out my window to see three police cars and a fire engine all below my window. I thought it was a traffic accident at first, or maybe a water pipe had broken. Before I could ask what was happening, everyone had left. It wouldn’t be until I got home from school that evening that I learned the whole story.
This was such a shock for me. Those pops that I’d so easily dismissed as fireworks were really the shots from a gun that was killing another human being.
Plus to think that a murder could happen here, at my very own apartment complex, hell, even in Davis! is so odd to think about. And in South Davis? You’d never expect it. No one has been murdered in Davis since 1998. We’re not exactly a dangerous, crime-ridden town by any means. Sure, we have our small student riots, fights, bike thefts, and some cars broken into so people can steal radios, but not murders! You don’t put “Davis” and “murder” together in the same sentence. This evening as people were coming back to work, I could hear people walking by my room, saying “what the hell happened?” or “what, a murder here? You gotta be joking.” We’re in some sort of denial that something as bad as that could take place in our clean, safe neighborhood.
I never met Dennis Thrower. Nor did I ever see him before. Robert, the manager to my place and a really nice guy to add to that, told me tonight that Thrower was pretty quiet and kept to himself, maybe even a bit reclusive. He lived here in South Davis, but worked in Sacramento as a hairdresser.
This all makes us wonder what kind of connections the murdered man had or what people he associated himself with. His apartment was broken into on Wednesday, and Thrower wanted to not only change locks, but also change apartments altogether. Not that I'm an Agatha Christie, but I think it's fairly safe to say that whoever did it probably knew who he was and where he lived, and if the police assumptions are correct, the earlier burglary may also be related to his murder. If he was indeed involved in some shady underworld, South Davis was the perfect place to lay low, because the green lawns and middle class families are the perfect disguise.
“You’d never think it’d happen here, wouldn’t you?” Robert asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “How surreal.”
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