Let’s Go Back Inside
I was like 12 or 13 at the time when this happened, and I was living in a suburb of Orlando, Florida. It was the typical American suburbia. We had this really ornery dude who lived next door. He never smiled or looked happy. When we moved in, my parents went over to introduce themselves.
He shouted, “Go away”! through the door. We never saw lights on. He mowed his grass religiously at seven in the morning on Saturdays. For three or four years, I never spoke to the man and neither did my parents…until 2003, in the middle of summer.
It was hot, humid, and a bunch of us were playing outside with hoses and basketballs, just being normal kids. All of the sudden, I saw him walking out of the garage and heading toward me. His next move had everyone’s jaws on the floor.
He walked right up to me, grabbed me by the throat, picked me up in the air one-handed, and said, “If you kids don’t calm down, I’m going to get my shovel and put each and every one of you in the ground”. Keep in mind, that we were all just kids at the time.
He was an extremely tall and muscular guy. He grabbed me by the throat so hard I busted a blood vessel in my neck. When I went inside, my throat was basically black and blue from the force with which he grabbed me.
My mom was running errands at the time, so I called her on her cell, and she promptly called my dad while he was at work. When my dad came home and I told him what happened, he was eerily calm.
My dad was normally very energetic, personality-wise, and he had this cold calm demeanor that honestly scared me to my bones. He went into his room and I followed him. What he did next made my blood run cold—I saw him pull his .45 out of his safe, load it, and head towards the front door.
My mom was in hysterics saying, “Don’t hurt him, don’t do it”, and all my dad was saying is “Come with me, let’s go talk to the neighbor”. We walked up to the neighbor’s front door. My dad knocked and asks the guy to step outside and tell him what happened.
When the guy went outside his door, my dad promptly slammed him across the face with the butt of his .45. The guy fell down and my dad said, “If you ever threaten another child, mine or otherwise, especially when they’re just playing outside, you don’t even want to guess what’s going to happen to you”.
My dad promptly stood up, and told me, “Let’s go inside”. The authorities then showed up and incarcerated my dad for assault.
However, it only really ended up being 100 hours of community service and misdemeanor trespass after the evidence of my assault and all the witness testimony corroborated my story.
The guy moved out maybe six weeks later. We found out several years later, and randomly, that the guy actually passed when he tried to fight some younger thugs over their football playing in his new neighborhood in a bad part of town, and he got shot.
The family said on the news that he was manic-depressive, with bipolar and schizophrenic tendencies. My dad is probably where I get my complete lack of fear from. Story credit: Reddit / Johnnyglass