In yesterday’s blog post article I wrote about stopping to read a road map at 12:10 a.m. in the small town of Mott, North Dakota, and a derelict person coming up to my vehicle. Mott, population 800, is in the middle of nowhere, with no businesses open past 10:00 p.m., and no one driving around or out on the street at midnight.
Earlier in the day I had taken my .32 caliber Beretta pistol out of my pants pocket and placed it inside the center console of my truck. When I stopped in Mott at 12:10 a.m. to do a Google search on my phone for a street map that showed how to keep driving west on Highway 21, I planned on getting out of my truck to urinate before I continued driving.
I had not seen any vehicles or people for the past 30 minutes while driving, or anyone when I stopped at the crossroads of Highway 8 and Highway 21 in Mott. I didn’t think that there was anyone around, because I didn’t see anyone. As I was looking down at my phone screen and typing, I glanced up briefly and saw a strangely behaving person about 75 feet away walking towards my vehicle. I was startled, and I immediately took my truck out of park, and drove away, even though I didn’t know where I was going.
Like I wrote in my previous blog post article, I was unnerved. I watched this person in my truck side mirror while I was driving away, and they were stumbling around like they were drunk, high on drugs, or had something mentally or physically wrong with them, or a combination of these things.
It’s possible that this person was just drunk and walking home from a bar that had closed. I don’t know. Some people reading this, not having been there, might want to tell me that maybe this person’s car broke down, maybe they needed help, did I ever stop to think about that? Yes, I thought about all kinds of possibilities about what this person could have been doing. There was nothing good about this situation.
For more than the past several years, I have been reminding myself to not stop for hitchhikers, to be more careful about stopping to help people, and to pay more attention when I get out of my vehicle when I am far away from home.
Many times while driving on an interstate highway in very rural North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, or Arizona, I will see someone walking on the side of the highway out in the middle of nowhere and I consider stopping to give them a ride. As I slow down and pass them, most of the time when I look at these people closely they are walking with an abnormal gait and they are very disheveled, like they are a mentally-ill homeless person, which they probably are.
In the past I had worked for a couple of years with developmentally disabled, brain injured, and mentally-ill adults. I have been attacked, and my co-workers have been attacked by some of these people, and had to deal with these people when they are in crisis. It can be very dangerous and trying dealing with developmentally disabled and mentally-ill adults. I have to think and remind myself, do I want to stop and get into an altercation with someone on the side of the road that I can already see is showing signs that there is something wrong with them?
Most of the time, if I see a person walking on the side of an interstate out in the middle of nowhere, I call 911 to report that there is a person walking at this mile marker on this interstate that appears to need help, because they are many miles from anywhere. I don’t want anyone to die from dehydration or hypothermia, but I don’t want to stop and get into an altercation with someone because I am not able to help them or do what they want, such as give them money, or drive them to so-and-so’s house.
A similar thing is stopping to help people who appear to be having car problems. The last four times that I have stopped to help people with car problems, all in North Dakota, I have regretted it tremendously, because these people had a lot more wrong with them than car problems. These people that I stopped to help were bad, trashy, drug-addict, low-life, criminal people from Seattle or Coeur D’ Alene.
So I keep having to remind myself to think twice before I stop to offer a ride to hitchhikers, or stop to help people who are having car problems, AND to not get out of my vehicle without my pistol on my person, and my phone in my pocket. Because, what if I get out of my vehicle to help these people, and they run and jump in my vehicle and take off with it, or hit me on the head, or shoot me, and leave me laying there. Now, instead of me stopping to help someone stranded out in the middle of nowhere, out in the cold, now I’m stranded out in the middle of nowhere, in the cold, freezing, with no phone because I left it in my vehicle that just got stolen from me.
As I was driving away from the derelict person who had approached my vehicle in Mott while I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on surrounding me, I was angry and upset about this situation. I don’t know what this person’s intentions were. I don’t know what they were going to do.
I looked at my passenger doors and they were all locked, luckily, they could have just as easily been unlocked. What would I have done if this person had opened my truck door suddenly, or gotten into my truck suddenly? I would have certainly assumed the worst, and reacted as if my life was in danger. However, if this person did this, they may have just been drunk and not had bad intentions.
If I had gotten out of my truck to urinate, and this derelict person had snuck up on me, surprised me, bumped into me, grabbed me, pushed me, I would have assumed the worst, I would have reacted as if my life was in danger, but if they were drunk, in their mind they might have thought that they were just playing around, not intending to harm me.
This could have turned out very badly for me, and for the person who approached my vehicle. I wasn’t being very alert. It might have been a better idea for me to have taken the interstate, instead of the rural, dark, not clearly marked highways.
Something else that is very troubling, is that in the moment of being surprised and frightened by someone opening my truck door, climbing into my truck, or grabbing hold of me outside of my truck, and me reacting with the belief that I am being attacked, after the fact, Law Enforcement is not going to see it like I believed what was happening in that moment.
I would be asked, did this person have a weapon, did this person have a gun, did this person have a knife? Did this person say that they had a gun or a knife? Did this person say anything threatening to you? What made you believe that your life was in danger?
In some states, the act of car-jacking is considered to warrant the use of deadly force to defend oneself. However, in many states, including North Dakota, just because someone attacks you, this in itself does not justify the use of deadly force to defend yourself. There has to be the ability and likelihood that your life was in peril, that the attacker had the ability to, and was going to take your life.
Though in my surprise and fright, in the moment that someone suddenly got in my vehicle or grabbed hold of me I would have believed in my mind that my life was in danger, if it later turned out that this person had no weapon, was merely drunk, likely had no murderous intent, I could have been criminally prosecuted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon or manslaughter. But had I not been surprised by a drunk derelict person at 12:10 a.m. I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
Dickinson58601 
Keep a Piss bottle in your truck. A ex large Gatorade bottle works fine. You don’t have to exit truck , just lean back in drivers seat and take care of business. I do this for several reasons. One is safety, I’m not vulnerable inside my vehicle when taking a leak as I would be standing next to vehicle. Also a cop can’t harass or write me a ticket for public urination since I’m inside my vehicle.
As for low life drug addicts, they seem to be in every nook and cranny of our country these days. They are like cockroaches. When I was a long haul trucker from 1988 thru 2003 I would often see people walking along the side of interstate highways miles from any civilization. It baffled me. In the middle of Arizona or Texas would be a single person, man or woman just walking along. I never have understood this. I stopped once to assist a woman out in middle of nowhere, no disabled car anywhere, she’s not dressed for outdoor survival, no water bottles or back pack. I stopped to check her situation and a State trooper stopped minutes after. He asked me if I could give her a ride. My immediate answer was No Riders Allowed.
Safety when parked , sitting in ,exiting or approaching and entering your vehicle is a favorite time for criminals to approach and rob or attack you.
You should have an heightened state of awareness when approaching your parked car, when exiting after parking and especially when gassing up at a convenience store gas station. These places seem to be a favorite of criminals.
When I was a long haul trucker parking at truck stops or rest areas were a high risk environment. Criminals would hide under the front of trailer, just behind the truck wheels and wait for the driver to exit truck . When he did, the low life would come up behind the unsuspecting driver and rob him, maybe smash his head with a pipe or something. I had a procedure I’d do after I had been parked a while for sleeping. Before exiting truck I would release brakes and drive forward quickly about 15 feet then back up and park. If anyone was hiding under the trailer, oh well. Not my problem.
Another favorite was robbing you while in rest room, usually at a rest stop or a shit hole truckstop. They’d let you get to the urinal and start pissing and stick a knife or gun in your back , take your money and run. I heard of guys getting robbed while sitting on toilet taking a crap. Thief reached under the stall , grabbed pants that were obviously pulled down around ankles, pulled the guy off toilet commenced to kicking and beating him while emptying his pockets. It’s dangerous everywhere. Don’t fall into a false sense of security just because you might be familiar with the area.
When I was trucking I carried 2 guns. A pistol and a Mossberg 12 g. pump. The pistol went in my pocket everytime I exited my truck. The shotgun stayed within arms reach while sleeping and even when driving.
If you’re not already familiar with him, there’s a guy on YouTube , Active Self Protection. It’s a great channel with lots of real time crimes caught on video and he teaches lessons and techniques using these videos as training tools. He constantly preaches “situational awareness “. It’s something that use to come natural to humans, but we’ve been dumbed down beyond even concern for our own survival, it seems. A bad guy doesn’t want a fight, he wants a victim. Stay aware and know what your next move is going to be when things go bad. Like you stated, you didn’t know how you would have reacted had the zombie entered you truck. Fortunately your doors were locked. Mine stay locked when I’m driving. It’s a point in my favor should a drugged out freak try to enter my passenger side door while I’m sitting at a red light or stuck in traffic.
I can’t say it enough, watch those that are watching YOU. Pay attention to those around you on parking lots, in grocery stores, etc.
Ray
Annapolis Md.
Land of Corruption and Welfare.
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In reply to Ray,
Yeah, I messed up on not thinking and not paying attention in Mott, North Dakota. But what was an even bigger eye-opener, which I am going to write about at-length, is my mistakenly thinking that I could react by shooting someone who jumped into my truck, because “I was in fear of great bodily harm or being killed” which is the lawful deadly-force criteria. I was wrong, because what it comes down to is not that I thought that “I was in fear of great bodily harm or death” it matters if the Police think that I was “in danger of great bodily harm or death”.
What if the Police think or insist that the person who jumped into my truck was a “harmless” drunk, because they had grown up with this person? Or, if the Police think or insist that I should have or could have just exited my truck and walked away, that deadly-force was not called for?
I watch John Correa with “Active Self Protection”, also Tom Larkin, also Masaad Aboud. What I need to explain to people, that when they take a CWP class, the instructor is going to give them the easy-to-remember criteria for lawful use of deadly force “you were in fear for your life”, but this is not completely true. It doesn’t necessarily matter what YOU thought, it matters probably more what the POLICE THINK, whether to arrest you or not.
The Police and the Prosecutor are not only going to ask you why didn’t you leave, walk away, run away, they are going to ask you was this person armed with a knife, did they have a gun, did they threaten you? REMEMBER THIS, after the fact, it is easy for the Police to ask you if this attacker had a knife or a gun, and if a knife or gun is not found, to answer “No”, but at that moment YOU DID NOT KNOW IF THIS PERSON HAD A KNIFE OR A GUN, you didn’t know. This makes a big difference, not knowing whether the person was armed or not.
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Yes, fear for your life only applies to Police in the event of a shooting, especially here in Maryland, the UnFree State. Here even in your own home if a violent intruder breaks in, the law states you must attempt to exit though a rear door or any other exit available. No stand your ground laws here. The violent intruder has the law on his side. If you cannot escape your own home and do resort to defending your own life and the lives of your family by shooting the violent intruder, its up to the political aspirations of the State prosecutor weather you’ll be charged with a crime. Also your financial well being is taken into consideration. After all, a State prosecutor is nothing but a low achieving State employee who cannot make it in the real world of Lawyers. If you have the means to hire a top shelf Attorney the State employee Prosecutor will be embarrassed in public at trial . BUT……if the underachieving State employee has a political agenda , most all do here in Liberal land, and is looking for further political gains he-she will endure the public scrutiny of prosecuting a law abiding citizen for protecting ones home and life. Anyone in these types of Government positions State, local or Federal are All Bottom feeders that orgasm over the power they yield.
*Any intruder is Violent by the mere act of breaking and entering .
Any intruder entering a home is armed. I encourage this to be verified before calling police to report that you just killed an intruder. Yes, he should be dead before calling the Government into your home. You should have some wounds about your arms and face from him attacking you. Dont give ANY statements until you are with your attorney. They mean it when they will use what you say against you, even before you’ve been charged with a crime. Police are not your friends.
Ray
Annapolis Md.
Formerly. U.S.A.
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