Violence Picks Victims At Random

Back in Cal Callahan’s day, the mischief Spokane kids made was a lot easier to stomach.

“It used to be, you went out in the back of the schoolyard and fought it out,” observes the 80-year-old North Side resident who attended North Central High in the late 1930s.

“Nowadays, they get out the guns.”

That’s only a working theory, of course. Callahan admits he doesn’t know if it was a carload of young delinquents or malicious adults who drove outside his tidy house last week and opened fire.

The cops apparently don’t know either.

The gunplay was probably a random act of violence. It’s hard to imagine this sweet old man was targeted by someone out to get him.

He has lived quietly and alone since his wife died three years ago.

Callahan was asleep in bed when bullets began flying into his home.

It happened at about 12:45 a.m. last Thursday. Although a neighbor heard six shots, only two struck Callahan’s place.

One bullet flew through the south siding and landed in the attic. A second slug struck a window sill. It punched through the blinds and ricocheted into the front room.

Callahan found the spent piece of lead in the off-white carpet. “It could have come through my bedroom, and I’d have been bye-bye,” says the retired bus driver.

You know Spokane has changed for the worse when a drive-by shooting at a senior citizen’s house only warrants a six-paragraph news release from the police and little attention from the media.

Callahan doesn’t live in some crack-alley slum. The houses along Hawthorne and Walton streets are mostly well-groomed and nicely painted. Yet looks can trick you, says one of Callahan’s neighbors.

Cindy Wilton lives on the southwest corner of the intersection. Callahan lives on the northeast corner.

In the last five years, Wilton says her house has been broken into twice. The first time, she arrived home to find two young punks still inside. They were ransacking her place and shooting at her picture frames and pets with a BB gun.

Wilton chased them out. A police officer later hollered at her for foolishly getting involved. Wilton was just “trying to defend my home.”

Sometime after the second burglary, a deranged stranger pulled up one day and began unloading household items into her yard. When she challenged him, he threatened to shoot her.

After that Wilton shelled out some serious money to secure her property. She put up a fence, which was promptly spray-painted with gang graffiti.

“It’s like we’re living in a prison now,” says Barb Wavaday, Wilton’s housemate.

The recent shooting has these two spooked. They are concerned for Callahan and their neighborhood.

“We have children playing around here,” Wilton adds. “I have a tendency now to want to duck every time I sit by the window.”

It was Wilton who heard the six gunshots. “I knew immediately what it was,” says the Army veteran. She ran to the window as the tires squealed.

According to the police report, several witnesses saw a lightcolored Dodge Neon or ‘80s Honda hatchback tearing out of the area.

Not too many minutes passed before police arrived. They began taking photographs and collecting shell casings that landed in the street.

They missed one. Another of Callahan’s neighbors found a stray casing over the weekend. He gave it to Wilton.

She says she’ll hand it over to the police when officers come back to see how the neighborhood’s holding up.

Who knows when that will be. The police spokesman didn’t return my phone calls.

It’s terrifying to think there are predators cruising the dark streets of Spokane. People who are thoughtless and dangerous enough to spray bullets at someone’s home.

Times sure have changed since Cal Callahan was a boy. “I guess if it had to happen it came out all right,” says the old man. “I’ve gotta think that way or I’d be staying up all night.”