One dead, two wounded in East Oakland shooting...

... and I saw the crime scene seconds after the automatic gunfire stopped. It sounded like firecrackers. I was too scared to move until it stopped.

It was 9:36 PM when I finally looked out the window. The street was eerily silent. I saw two stopped cars at the intersection on my corner. A man staggered out of the first car. In less than 5 minutes a cop car pulled up and I heard the staggering man say, "I've been shot." Ten more minutes and there were eight cop cars, two fire trucks and an ambulance.

A police officer taped my building into the crime scene. One was dead, two wounded in East Oakland shooting at the corner of 12th St. and 47th Ave... my corner. I'm sorry that I didn't have the courage to look while the shooting was happening. I wish I had some helpful information for the police.

This is the second killing on my street in the year and a half that I've lived here.

The crime scene investigation was still going strong at midnight on Wednesday when I went to bed, but everything was cleared away by 6AM Thursday when I woke up. Later that morning I walked to the two piles of shattered auto glass left behind. I saw the blood stain on the street of the murdered man from the first car, and the blood trail of the staggering, innocent victim of the second car on the sidewalk. There was also the entrails of a dead rat at the scene and a red seven-day candle. It's flame snuffed out by the drizzling rain.

This morning a city truck came by and cleaned up the blood and glass. Heavy sigh... I don't know what else to say. It's upsetting and scary. Life and death goes on.

I was quietly knitting the sleeves of a green sweater when the slaying went down.