The Amarillo Shooter is Too Close To Home For Me…Literally
As the saga of the Amarillo drive-by shooter continues to unfold, I find myself a very uneasy person.
I have no doubt you are uneasy as well as evidenced by the over 6,000 people I saw listening to police scanner feeds last night.
Without giving away my exact location of where I live, I can tell you that one of the shooting incidents happened a literal 2 blocks away from my house the other night.
Now thankfully, my family and I weren't at home as we were driving back from my sons baseball tournament in New Mexico, but that almost makes it scarier for me. We were on the road late at night, and he/she was in my neighborhood.
As I sat at home last night, I caught wind that the shooter may have been back at it again. My kids had already gone to bed, and knowing the shooter had already been in my area, I was on high alert. I downloaded a police scanner app and started intently listening.
I start hearing some of the roads and areas they were mentioning that potential shots had been fired. Sure enough, the shooter was right back in my area.
Here's what I was able to figure out. They seemed to have a loop that they kept traveling in. Washington St. seemed to be a commonality in their travels as they went around in what seemed like a giant square over and over. Now, it could have been that multiple calls were coming in at different times from the same relative locations, so in theory they may not have been traveling in a loop, it may have just been one go around.
As I listened to the scanner, I reached out to a co-worker of mine who lives within blocks of me and started chatting with her. She went out into her backyard to try and listen for shots, sirens, speeding cars. Alas, nothing was really heard. Then just shy of 11:30pm, there is was. Sirens. Could it be they finally caught them? Or was it just typical police work and they were on their way to another call?
As I listened to the scanner throughout the evening, they kept rattling off street names. I started to wonder, could there be multiple people involved in this? I mean surely there was NO way they could cover that much ground this fast, right? A description of a vehicle was given at one point. A black Tahoe. That is a polar opposite of the "dark sedan" that was given the day prior. So are they using a different vehicle each night? Is it multiple people?
Until police can catch it red handed (and we know they're working to do just that), we won't know the full story. All I can say is, stay safe, stay off the roads once that sun goes down if you don't need to be out and stay vigilant.
Oh and one last thing that I learned last night...don't overreact. Unless you are a veteran of the police force or are an expert scanner listener, you can't be 100% sure of what you're hearing. There could be decoy calls and codes, they could flat out be speaking in codes to cover up things in order to make the shooter believe they aren't close to them. Definitely listen and pay attention, but don't overreact to everything you hear.