Everyone. Every. One.

Seems pretty straightforward of a concept and essentially means: all people.

Unfortunately though in recent months I’ve become increasingly aware of the fact that when we reference the term everyone, we don’t always mean every. one.

On Wednesday night this week there was a shooter in our backyard. An actual gunman, with an AR15, that was firing it around.

Needless to say this is not a common occurrence in our community, and was only possible through a series of very specific events, that happened in a very specific way. The traumatic experience for me wasn’t even the shooter in our backyard, it was what happened directly after that.

First though, let me explain how any of this even came to be.

Earlier that evening in another part of town, a man stole a car and was soon followed by police. This ultimately led to a car chase, which ultimately led to our neighborhood in Atlanta. When the man driving hit a dead end in our neighborhood and couldn’t turn around, he panicked.

He got out on foot with his gun, and started running.

He ran into our backyard, which is a shared common-space for our community, and said to our next door neighbor who was outside and looked alarmed, “I’m not going to hurt anyone, don’t worry.” Making good on that promise he didn’t hurt a single person, and also didn’t threaten to. With an AR15 in hand he definitely could have. But the thing was, he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone; he was trying to get away.

By this time, there were continuously more vehicles showing up with armed officers getting out and jogging through our neighborhood with rifles. I watched as they pulled down their plastic face shields, or adjusted their riot gear vests, and it felt like I was on the set of a movie. It instantly grew within me a personal compassion for countries and communities where these types of scenes are the norm.

Then began an eerie, ten-minute period of silence.

No one knew where the gunman was hiding, not even the police. I looked out our window, my finger slowly pushing the blinds to the side, so I could see the officers motioning to one other with hand signals. All kinds of uniforms were starting to show up: SWAT, Atlanta City PD, Cobb County PD, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, etc. The man was nowhere to be seen.

It was a long ten minutes. We counted over 30 armed officers, patrolling through the streets of our neighborhood, some walking and some running, in all directions. Then a helicopter showed up and hovered above us, so close in fact that the bushes in front of our window where swaying in its wind.

Finally, in complete desperation, the man made his location known and started yelling out to any onlooker he could make eye contact with, “Hide me, hide me!” he said. Each person said no, and went back in their houses. So he kept running. Following a large line of trees at the end of our neighborhood, he ran to where the community dumpster was, and hid behind it. The officers started closing in. There was no way out at this point.

The man fired, and the police took his life.

Because our window was open I heard the way they had all been screaming at him and intimidating him before the shots. Their voices were loud and many, and I remember feeling scared of those officers, even over a block away, and from inside our house with the door locked.

Looking back I have no doubt the police must have been scared, and rightfully so, but their job was to deescalate the situation. Although they may have been following professional protocol and doing their job, the situation clearly had not been calmed. Did this story need to end in death the way it did, especially for a man that had clearly and consistently not wanted to harm anyone?

People asked, Why didn’t he just surrender, and was the situation handled this way because he was a person of color, and did he need to be fatally shot (why not the leg especially for such great marksmen as SWAT), and was he given a verbal warning that they were going to shoot (his legal right), and did they exhaust every other option possible before murder?

The main thing on my mind wasn’t fear, it was anger.

Ironically, it was anger at fear. Because once fear set in people no longer saw a man, just a threat. He became a criminal, a possible murderer, and someone who could affect their sense of safety and well-being. Fear becomes a powerful and destructive lens we look through when dealing with who we deem “a bad guy” (a post online later called him that). In this situation, it was not about a person who made a mistake, or ran with the wrong crowd, or made a series of terrible decisions, or didn’t know how to turn their life back around. It became once again about a category of people (offenders, perpetrators, suspects, homeless, inmates, and criminals).

The essence of the problem here is dehumanization.

When it comes to “the good guys vs the bad guys” this popular story is everywhere: in the cartoons we show our kids, in the media we consume, and in the stories we love to hear. Why? We want the good guys to win over the bad guys; but what happens when the bad guys aren’t inherently bad. What if behavior doesn’t dictate the worth or value of a person?

Society sees bad people living on the streets because they burned bridges in their lives, or bad people going to prison because they are criminals and that’s what they deserve. We may think we would never do something like that. We may think we could never identify with people like that. But the lottery of life doesn’t provide an even start for everyone. I’m not saying the man with a gun, causing chaos in a residential area, wasn’t in the wrong by any means. But I later found out he was the exact same age as me: 37. Yet although we may have shared things in common, he wasn’t in the same category as me: he wasn’t seen as good, or a girl, or white.

When all was said and done, there was yellow crime tape strung up around the perimeter area where the man was shot. Everyone seemed more relaxed, especially law enforcement, who were now giving each other fist bumps and “well done” pats on the back. Neighbors slowly started coming out of their houses and gathering into different groups but all saying the same thing, “That was crazy! Well at least everyone is okay.” But what they meant was, everyone who wasn’t in the criminal category was okay. They didn’t mean every. one.

As I looked toward the tape where young man’s body was now laying dead in the street I thought, everyone is not okay.