Crime and hysteria

I received the following e-mail this morning from a University of Arkansas at Little Rock e-mail list. It came, ostensibly, to another University employee from someone at Dillard's corporate office and the UALR person thought they needed to share it:

Just wanted to let you know about the update that was provided to Brandon from the Little Rock Detectives. Please share this with everyone you know. This came straight from the Detective working Brandon’s case:

Come to find out, this is the fourth time this has happened in the River Market Area in the last 4 weeks. One of the previous three involved a young woman who was abducted, taken to ATM’s, then brutally beaten, raped, and killed. Her body was found in the SAME EXACT LOCATION as where the two suspects dropped Brandon off on Thursday night. The local media is cooperating with the Police at the request of the Mayor and is not publicizing any of these crimes as it would give “the wrong image” about Little Rock and the River Market. So instead, it continues to happen. Brandon was parked, as were the previous three, under the bridges between the Marriott and Axiom. The assailants were waiting in the shadows.

Here’s what actually took place: Brandon Harris (who sits right next to me) left a River Market restaurant Thursday night at about 9:00 pm. He was parked under the Markham/Cantrell Bridges between the Marriott and Axiom. Two men came from nowhere, stuck a gun to him and forced him into the backseat of his car. They then drove to an ATM, holding Brandon at gunpoint. They demanded his pin number, retrieved the daily limit, and drove out to the swampy area on I-530. During this drive, they continued to pistol whip him in the head. They took a road underneath one of the 530 bridges, stopped the car, shot him once while he was in the floorboard. They then pulled him out, fired twice more (both shots luckily missed) then picked up his cell phone and called someone stating “It’s done, we just threw him out at the drop off”. Brandon was smart enough to play dead until they left. He then spent the night crawling through the woods and swamp until he was found the next morning.

A group of people here at work have decided to make up flyers and start distributing them at night to people in the River Market describing the details of the four attacks. And this will continue until the city and the media has done something about it. This would be the reason why Channel 7 had some of the details botched in their report on Friday night. Please send this to everyone you know.

I read it and thought how strange to be in on the seminal moment of an urban legend. And, of course, that turned out to be the case. There have been two robberies by a pair of juveniles. No rapes. No murders. Just incipient hysteria.

But consider how something like this can impact a restaurant-entertainment area like Little Rock's River Market (think Beale in Memphis or Deep Ellum in Dallas). Something like this gets some buzz and pretty soon people are afraid to go down under the overpass to smoke dope or get blow jobs or whatever the fuck these people were doing under an interstate overpass. Sheesh.