Getting shot at is petrifying

4 comments June 26th, 2008

I relived the petrifying fear of being shot at when reading about the two random shootings of motorcycle riders off Alpine Road Tuesday.

Twice in my life, I’ve been shot at, not intentionally.

The first time, I was about 10 years old. My much older brother took my younger brother and I hunting pheasants in a field in Hebron. He told us to stay right by his side as we walked through corn rows. I got slightly ahead of my older brother,  scared up a bird and he shot at the pheasant too close to my head for me to ever go hunting again. Whew!

The other time was in Harvard about 10 years ago. I was walking/half-jogging on a country road, and two bullets whizzed in front of me a few seconds apart. There was nothing but an open field where the shots came from. But there were houses maybe a fourth-mile away. I was terrified and jogged home a bit faster than usual, got in my van and drove to the houses where I thought the shots might have come from. Folks at the first house said they weren’t shooting, but the guy in the house just to the east had a target on bales of hay in his backyard. I laid into him about his bullets scaring me, and he said he didn’t realize how far they’d travel and that he’d stop it. I should have reported him to the McHenry County police.

Share your petrifying moments, even if they don’t involve guns.