A newsworthy tale

Last night I walked right into the middle of a newsworthy drama. My guitar class is held in a building on the corner of Victoria Rd here in Sydney. It went a few minutes overtime last night and most of the guys were still messing about on their guitars, but I had things to do so I was actually the first person to leave the classroom. Just as I stepped outside into the small car park out the front, three women came racing down the street from Victoria Road, clearly terrified, and shouting at each other to “get in the car, get in my car …”. Then I could see what I somehow registered as a policeman standing on the corner with both arms on his gun, trained on somebody, and there was just a whole lot of commotion and shouting and I thought I could hear the police yelling “get on the ground” …

It was one of those situations where you haven’t a clue what is going on and can’t gather information fast enough to know what to do, but going further onto the street (I was parked off down the street as the parking in the area is hopeless and the carpark is always full) didn’t seem like the best idea, so I turned and ran back into the guitar class. I burst back in the door babbling something about there being people running and yelling and police with guns drawn outside. The guys all just looked at me and then some of them went outside. By the time I went back out it had all become much quieter. There is a toilet block at the end of the car park right on Victoria Rd, so we couldn’t see very clearly what was going on, but some of the guys went and peered around the edge of the toilets and then came back and said there had been a man walking around with a rifle (turns out he had two rifles) and the police now had him down on the footpath, right across the road from the college. I had to drive home that way as there are limited places you can turn right onto Victoria Road, and they still had the fellow down on the footpath then.

It was all so unexpectedly dramatic and bewildering. Here is the media release that came out last night. The fellow had apparently been walking down the road firing into the air and had shot at a passing bus and then fired again before surrendering to police. The Sydney Morning Herald article is here. You never know when you are going to be in the vicinity of a crazy person with a gun. But I am thankful he didn’t actually manage to shoot anybody and surrendered to police so that didn’t have to shoot him either.