If this were a buzzfeed article, it would be called “You won’t believe why this man got chased down the street (twice!) and beaten up to steal his phone.”. But that would be a misrepresentation: I didn’t get beaten up, and it’s only unbelievable if you get stuck in the idea that the world ought be perfect. I’ll instead just tell the story and throw down some thoughts afterwards.
This happened two months ago and I’m completely fine now, having almost finished off at the dentists, and only a few mental effects remain, which I’ll discuss somewhere in here.
Whereas some things I write on this blog have a structure in terms of following an argument, this post is split into me chronologically telling a story and then in my reflections on it. The reflections are all over the place, some good, some bad, some just things I found interesting, and aren’t particularly structured. But that’s how it’s meant to be told, I think; it isn’t a logically coherent thing, just me trying to explain different things, it ties into a few different thoughts I have which I thought I’d use this to weave them in. This is probably a lot more effort than it’s worth in terms of a blog post, mountain out of a molehill, but it’s one of the most eventful things to happen to me in awhile I guess.
The Story
It was one of my friends’ birthdays and the group of six of us (all erasmus students in Bonn, four girls and two guys) were on our way to one of our houses to present the birthday girl with a cake that a couple of the other girls had baked. It was a sunny afternoon, around 30 degrees, with plans to go swimming later, and the area of Bonn we were in was a nice one. Chatting away and walking along on the pavement, we have our first encounter with a guy who gave some unpleasant comments to our group. He was next to the open passenger door of a car (driver being sat inside), standing on the kerb, so we walked past quite closely. To the first two, he just said “Motherfucker.”; to the other four of us, he said (in German, then in English) “Do you want to fuck me? I have a big cock.”. This he said very aggressively and arrogantly, staring us right in the face from less than a metre away. We carried on walking – the house was just round the corner – and that was all.
We were all quite shocked by it – both because of how brutal it was and because of the contrast with the niceness of the environment. We’d all experienced these sorts of comments before, but not as badly as this. We discussed it a bit in the house and I’d thought about it too. Thinking about the sexual assault and rape cases that I’d read while studying criminal law, plus the sexual violence stories I’ve read, I reckoned that these were the sort of guys who could do some pretty nasty stuff, if the openness with how they talked to us was anything to go with. I considered a bit whether I could have reacted any differently (instead of just saying nothing and walking on) – I would have wanted to say something, but here it didn’t seem safe enough (plus the slight language barrier), but I did think that I could at least get the numberplate of the car and call the police.
We left the house about half an hour later to go to a nearby pool. Here’s a map to make it slightly easier to understand:
The girls walked down the stairs and round the corner (east along Wachsbleiche), the other guy was unlocking the bike he’d left outside, and I’d walked halfway down the stairs but was hanging back to wait for the guy. The car with the two guys in it then came round the corner and pulled up next to my friend unlocking his bike; the same guy had his window down and started chatting to him. It was just general chat, asking him where he was from and why he was here (studying), but it was odd that they were talking to him at all. From where I was halfway down the stairs, behind the car, I decided to get my phone out to get the number plate – my phone was in my bag, so I took that off, got it out, put my bag back on, then started to film. I got the number plate quite clearly, then moved round slightly to get the guys face too as he was leaning out. He saw me, then stuck his head back in. The car moved slightly (or maybe it was just brakelights), and I was expecting them to just drive off, but then he got out and ran towards me, shouting “give me the phone or I’m going to bomb you” (in German) and grabbing my shoulder. I pushed him away and ran down the stairs; he followed me. Reaching the bottom, I started to the right and saw that he tried to go that way too, then changed direction to the left and sprinted down the street. Once I’d seen him go right and I’d gone left I knew (or at least, was pretty confident from the sprinting that I’ve done and fitness that I have that I could get away) that I could get away. I checked behind me a couple of times and have a vague memory of seeing him stopping chasing me and heading back to his car, and another vague memory of realising that I’d left my friend with his bike behind on his own, but then I’d made it to the end of the street (t-junction to the east by the grass) and stopped. A couple walked round the corner and gave me a funny look but carried on past me. I’d run past the group of my friends (the one with the bike included), and went back towards them, then we all carried on walking in the direction I had been running. One of them commented that I could run quite quickly, and I pantingly tried to exlain what had happened, but it didn’t make much sense as they hadn’t even seen that the car had come round again.
About fifteen seconds later, the car came screeching round the corner and stopped just in front of us. I recognised it and took off again back the way I’d come (west), the same guy got out the car again and ran after me, shouting something. The road had cars parked along both sides, and I swapped from the pavement to the road in the first gap between cars that I found; then I heard that the car was coming up behind me and swapped back onto the pavement. I was trying to make it to the same steps that I’d come down before as this would mean the car couldn’t follow, but the car stopped ahead of me and the driver got out. I turned back again and found myself at one end of a parked car with the chasing guy on the other end. It was the classic situation like you’d find in every game of tig where he couldn’t go either side because then I could go round the other, but one side had only narrow pavement so my only option was to try and make it across the road to the pavement on the other side of the other side of parked cars. I went for it and he came across to block me off, and then it all happened a bit quickly (I have a few snapshot freeze-frame memories which I’ve pieced together). I think I put an arm out to hand him off but that he grabbed onto my bag just after that (without a bag I reckon I could’ve got round him, having had the situation enough times in rugby it’s unlikely he would’ve done a good enough tackle to get me), then threw me sideways to the ground before jumping on top of me and grabbing my neck. He shouted “give me the phone” again; the phone, being still in my hand, I threw down to the side of me so that he could take it. He let go of my neck, but punched me twice in the face, once on the temple and once on one side of the mouth – being on all fours on the floor and trying to get into a protective ball position, I remember seeing one of my teeth bouncing out onto the pavement in front of me and making a mental note to find it later. Then I was curled up on the floor and heard footsteps and voices behind me, shouting at him to get back in the car, and then hearing the car go away.
The voices were from a couple of my friends and a random passer-by, who had been on the pavement quite close. I got up straight away and was completely with it, not phased at all, and tried to take control of the situation. I grabbed my tooth of the floor, then checked that someone had called the police and ambulance (which they already had), then tasked someone else with sorting out the witnesses (which he was already doing). Then I sent someone else to go and fetch milk from their house for the tooth, as I’d heard somewhere that that helps to preserve it. One of the friends – a medical student – washed the tooth and put it in water (which I also swilled round my mouth to spit out the blood, feeling slightly badass while doing it), then checked out my wounds: I had bad grazes on both knees and one elbow, two lots of punched-in-the-face, one cut on the back of my head (presumably recoil from being punched). She cleaned up the wounds a bit (although I initially refused, she insisted and I realised I was being stupid), and then the ambulance and police turned up.
The Rest of It
The ambulance put my tooth – which had come out in its entirety instead of breaking at all – in a special box with a solution designed for teeth which had come out, then wiped and dressed the wounds, with me sat in the ambulance. Partway through this the police turned up, one of them spoke to me inside the ambulance and the other outside to the rest of the people (friends and witnesses). I explained what had happened – and that I had been filming the guy on my iPhone – and he got his iPad out for me to log into iCloud, but I had turned off both the ‘Find my iPhone’ App (which would have allowed us to track them for as long as they had the phone and hadn’t destroyed it) and Photo Stream (for uploading photos to the cloud storage; I didn’t have much data) so that didn’t help. None of us had witnessed much useful – two turkish-looking guys had jumped out of a black car and attacked me – and it had happened so quickly and so surprisingly that everybody had been shocked. Especially as the car had driven ahead of where I was running and my friends were behind it, nobody seemed to really have the numberplate, but three different people had three different guesses.
The ambulance took me to the hospital and patched up my wounds (knee and arm bleeding a bit) and checked whether the rest of me was injured in terms of bones in the face or from concussion from whacking my head on the pavement – that was all fine. They then left me to wait in the waiting room for the emergency dentist. After an hour and a half they sent me to a different building, then after waiting there for a further hour I got to see a dentist. He was quite cheery and made a comment about my tooth, which was apparently about a third shorter than would be expected (I hadn’t properly looked at a tooth outside the mouth before and was surprised that the roots were as long as they were!), before giving me some anaesthetic and pushing the tooth back in, holding it in place with some glue and a plastic strip to the two neighbouring teeth. The strip was white so not too visible, but some people did notice it over following month. I was then told to go to a dentists’ in central Bonn the following morning for some x-rays for a check-up.
After finishing at the hospital I was told to go to get some prescription antibiotics from the emergency pharmacy (there’s a rota of different ones taking it in turns to be open overnight) and then on to the police to give a statement – it later turned out that somewhere along the police chain of communication there was a confusion about how much longer I was in Germany for; instead of the tenth of July they had heard the tenth of June, so wanted to talk to me that evening. This was cleared up once I arrived at 2200, so I didn’t give the full statement, but I did give a description of what I thought he looked like and had a look through photos of people who had committed similar offences over the last few years to see if I recognised any of them. I was feeling very weak and tired by this point having not had anything to eat for the whole day or even to drink (which I had decided not to drink incase there was going to be any anaesthetic, thinking back to when I had surgery and wasn’t allowed liquids – in hindsight this was silly of me). I eventually got to bed at midnight, where I had a night of poor sleep with my head and face throbbing and knees sore.
The dentist the following morning was fairly uneventful as everything was alright in my mouth (well, unchanged from the previous evening), I arrived at 0800 to be one of the first there (it only being open 0800-1100 anyway) and was seen fairly quickly. They explained some of what the rest of the treatment would be (root canal treatment), but I didn’t really understand at the time (not knowing the German words for these things or how teeth and gums work), apart from that there was a roughly 50% chance that the tooth would survive, otherwise I would have to have a fake tooth of some sort. Afterwards I finally got some food, having soup and bread, and it tasted great.
Thankfully, this week was the half-term break, so I didn’t have any classes or lectures to turn up to and could just stay sheltered in my room recovering, apart from having rehearsals on a couple of evenings. For the first couple of days I did lots of eating to make up for the lost food, mostly soup and bread, and eating was very slow: because of the swelling and soreness of the gum I couldn’t open my mouth too widely and could only chew with half of my mouth. It actually took about five weeks until I was confident enough of my tooth not being in pain that I could eat completely normally. I felt very tired and weak for the first couple of days, but this was presumably mostly due to the lack of food and sleep instead of any actual trauma.
The rest of the wounds were unproblematic apart from one of my knees: there was a 5cm-or-so long wound right on top of the kneecap. For the first four days, every time I changed the dressing I ripped off the scab and it had to start healing again, and after that it started to scab over, but during the night would heal in a static way and would then get ripped again in the morning or during the day when my knee got walked on and had to bend. A couple of weeks into the healing process it had a thick scab and no more bleeding, but the scab was made up of four different parts with breaks in it to allow the knee to bend.
The police took a statement a few days later, but neither I nor any other witnesses knew the numberplate or recognised and photos, so it wasn’t going anywhere. I went to check the area to see if there was CCTV and there were a couple of cameras on the delivery area of a concert hall which would have caught it (perfectly, where the car stopped and the guy got out), but they were live-feed only with no recordings (something which would not be heard of in the UK but the German culture is much less keen with CCTV so it isn’t so unusual). This was pretty gutting when I realised that the guys were just going to get away with it.
Reflections
I spent the first two days thinking through what had happened, it probably wasn’t out of my mind for more than an hour at a time, trying to work out exactly what had happened and when and to think about what I had done wrongly or could have done better. Three days afterwards I went to the police to give my full statement, and at around this point I decided not to let myself dwell on it anymore (having by then probably thought through all the different options and possibilities). My reflections were:
1. It was interesting to see how memory had worked. I could remember a few little snapshots, but there were lots of short gaps. This wasn’t surprising and is something I’ve experienced before, but never in this way in an emergency situation; I’d heard the phenomenon discussed and noticed that when I was in sprinting races I barely remembered any of what happened, and the theory was that when the body is focussing so hard on something it lets go of non-essential functions like memory. I had to do a bit of figuring out to get an idea of the order of events between being cornered and getting up after the floor once they had left, especially how he got me to the ground (I think he must’ve got a hold on my bag and then thrown me down, as it wasn’t likely to me a good quality rugby tackle) and how long I was on the ground for (whether I was dazed for fifteen seconds or in control and protecting myself for about four seconds).
2. In terms of what had actually happened, I reflected a lot on whether I had done something stupid. A couple of friends commented on this too, saying that I was “silly for getting involved” or similar. I felt foolish about it as well for a short period – I had taken a risk and come off badly from it. But then I recognised this for what it was: victim blaming. Until this point, I’d only heard this discussed in feminist discussion about rape as a phenomenon where the victim is asked questions about what they were wearing, whether they were drunk, whether they took risks they shouldn’t have like walking somewhere dodgy or accepting a lift, or similar, none of which should have anything to do with the moral blame of their conduct, and in a way that ignores to some degree the aspect that it was perpetrated by somebody doing something really terrible. Once I remembered that I had done nothing wrong (taking a photo in a public place) and that their reaction was completely unexpected, I put aside most of the foolish feeling. I was taking a photo to stand up to a guy who was at least creepy and at most very dangerous, and while in hindsight I could have thought that this might end up the way it did, I think it’s a cause that I’m willing to take a couple of punches in the face for. Bad things happen because good people do nothing, and of course there’s a balance to be struck so as not to get involved when it’s futile and dangerous, but never doing anything to stop bad people is a bad policy too; I think this instance was a case where I’m happy to take the risk.
3. In some ways, I got unlucky that his fist hit me in such a way that it knocked out a tooth. My other teeth weren’t damaged at all, so it must’ve just been that a knuckle clipped the edge of a tooth on it’s way past or something. If it wasn’t for the tooth coming out then the effect of the attack would have been much less and I would just have cuts and bruises, the tooth has caused a lot more hassle in terms of disturbing eating and requiring ongoing dental care. But on the other hand, I guess it could have been worse too: while this was already a gross overreaction, what if there hadn’t been other people around and nobody had shouted at them? Would they have continued to attack me just for fun? Did they maybe have weapons of some sort on them or in the car?
4. There were two opportunities where I made a mistake or could have done something better or differently. The first was when I was filming him: I could have simply memorised the numberplate and called the police off that, or I could have taken a covert picture instead of fairly openly filming for five seconds plus. In hindsight its foreseeable that he might have come after me for it, but at the time I wasn’t expecting it; it’s easy in retrospect knowing how it ended up to think it foreseeable, but at the time the guys in the car hadn’t actually done anything wrong, so if they were thinking rationally I’m not sure it would be a good idea to assault somebody (in coming after me if I had managed to get away) or to commit the worse offences of hurting me and stealing my phone and hope that they don’t get caught from it (which they didn’t and will not). But in counter to this, part of what I wanted to do was stand up against them, which is probably why I did it openly, and I probably had calculated the risk and chance of me escaping against this.
4.2 The second was after I had run away the first time and made it to the end of the street, but then went back to my friends. At the time it didn’t cross my mind at all that they would come after me a second time, but I should have played it safe and kept running to somewhere safe (of which there were a few possibilities nearby, or at least places where the car couldn’t follow me so I could continue to outrun the guy). This one was a definite mistake, but I can live with that; no point in dwelling on a mistake, and I’ve learned the lesson well now, this being an incident with a fairly minor consequence.
4.3 I’ve thought a lot about whether there was any other way I could have tried to run away but haven’t thought of anything that would have been better. I possibly could have made it to the staircase I was trying to get to when the car was in front of me before the driver would have got out, but at the time couldn’t see round the corner enough to know and still don’t know if it would have worked, so don’t regret that at all.
4.4 I’ve considered whether I should have just given him the phone as soon as he asked for it; given that the car was still there I could then just have looked at and memorised the numberplate. But I ran because I thought I had quite good chances at getting away (which I would have done if I had thought to keep running) and didn’t want to hand over my phone (both for the value of it and on principle). There’s also the possibility that had I given the phone over he would then have attacked me, there being nothing to stop him and being angry and looking for trouble he might have wanted to.
4.5 I’ve also thought about why they might have reacted so strongly. Was it just the affront that somebody was standing up to them and getting in their way? Did they maybe have drugs or weapons in the car that they didn’t want the police to find? Had they done something that they didn’t want to be found for? It was almost good that they attacked me because it puts them on the police radar before they do anything worse, but given that they won’t get caught this won’t actually make a difference (if there was CCTV this story would be different). Are they more or less likely to do something in the future having had someone stand up to them slightly but then come out much worse off?
5. In a strange way, if I view this incident as a test of my abilities, I can be happy with how I did in some ways and learn from it in other ways (hence the reflecting). I’m pleased with how I reacted: I kept a clear head the whole time and never had any fear, apart from a brief moment when I got hit in the face (but even then, I didn’t panic and kept doing what was best and remember calmly registering it when the tooth got knocked out), reacting rationally the whole time. In some ways this might have been benefited from the parkour training of being able to trust yourself to react, but I wouldn’t say it was only down to that, I’m generally pretty good at staying calm when I need to. Just after it had happened I wasn’t in shock or anything and kept on functioning well with talking to people and sorting things out (when some of the people who had seen it got quite shocked). But one lesson to learn on this point is to consciously pay attention while running instead of allowing the flight response to completely take over – maybe by checking more over my shoulder while running away, it might have been able to make it back the way I came once I saw that the car had gone past it or something. This is also something I found while attending the Journey to the End of the Night chase game, as somebody was trying to catch me in Venice and I got myself trapped into a dead-end which I could have avoided if I had thought about it. Hopefully I’ll remember this one next time.
This post got a bit big, so I’ve split it into two parts. The second part includes how this event affected (and still affects, at the time of writing) how I think and my life at the moment, the idea of ‘being ready’, the fact that I didn’t have a phone for two weeks, and the framing effect and the narrative of telling the story.
Second part link here