Unnerving experience this morning.
I spent all night at Starbucks, redesigning Zenarchery, and headed for the bus stop (and home) around 6:30 am. The 24 hour Starbucks I go to is at the corner of Flamingo and Paradise, and the bus stop is a half-block east on Flamingo, directly in front of Terrible’s Casino. (You can see exactly where I was here, courtesy of Google Maps.)
As I approached the Terrible’s sign, I noticed something white and red lying on the grass. As I got closer, I saw what it was: a dress shirt, crumpled on the grass, and absolutely covered with fresh blood. I was so tired, I took a picture of it, thinking it was just odd…and then I realized what I was actually looking at, and what it implied.
Another man was walking up with a Terrible’s custodian — he had noticed it and had brought the custodian to throw it away. The man walked off and I told the custodian “Dude, you might want to call Metro. That didn’t come from a nosebleed or anything.”
He went to get his supervisor and I waited. When the supervisor got there, I told him the same thing — the amount of blood on the shirt suggested that somebody got hurt, bad. He tried to play it off — “Maybe somebody fell down drunk and cracked their head” — but he obviously didn’t believe it, and neither did I.
Finally, he just had the first guy throw it away, using latex gloves. (“And throw the gloves away, too, when you’re done.”) As he picked it up, I could see that there were several spots where the blood hadn’t even begun to dry — it was shiny and moist.
So I called Metro’s non-emergency line myself as I waited for the bus. I explained the situation, but the operator told me there wasn’t much they could do about it, unless they had a stabbing in the area. “Well, if you do discover a stabbing in the area, check the trash at Terrible’s,” I told her. And that was that.
But I thought about it on the bus ride home. There was a lot of blood. And it wasn’t droplet blood, like it would be from a scalp wound or even a heavy nosebleed. There wasn’t a drip pattern, or a spatter pattern. It was sprayed. It looked like somebody cut somebody else’s artery and got hit with the spray. And the blood was bright red, like fresh arterial blood. (It was blood, by the way, not paint or some foodstuff. I know what fresh blood looks like. It was too thick to be cranberry juice or anything like that.)
I think somebody fucked somebody else up really bad and then ditched their shirt, either on foot or throwing it from a car window. It wasn’t an expensive shirt, but I noticed that it had metal snap buttons, not push-through buttons like you’d normally see. I’d guess it was about a medium or a small, though I never saw it stretched out.
I guess we’ll never know. Metro wasn’t interested, neither were the Terrible’s custodians. But I think somebody out there is dead or hurt real bad.
Welcome to Vegas.
Pretty foolish of Metro not to infer the same things you did, i.e. that the shirt was ditched from a car window and any crime would have to have occurred in the immediate area. How much would it have cost them to dispatch an investigator and collect blood samples for DNA analysis. Then at least they would have the DNA on file if any other evidence came to light. It’s amazing how petty bureaucracy, ineptness, and an ethic of “We can’t do A unless B” stymies police investigations and utterly bollockses up the justice system in this country.