haunted memories

While I love the album and the songs, I will never be able to listen to Lauryn Hill's Miseducation of Lauryn Hill cd without thinking of the terrifying time in March 1999 when Amy Watkins was murdered in Brooklyn. That album was being played within an inch of its life all over New York at the time.

She was a couple years older than I was and lived in the same building my friends did in Prospect Heights. She was getting out of the subway stop I always used, on the same side and staircase I always used, at about the same time I often got home, and she was stabbed clean through with a kitchen knife just a few blocks away from the stop. It could have been me. It could have been any of my friends. She was a white woman from Kansas who was in Hunter's social work program. This killing was for the $8 she had on her.

The guy who did it was detained close to the time of my departure from New York and I wasn't following it. I wish I had been because to this day, I just don't understand what the point was. I think that murder has disturbed me more than anything else has in my life, and frightened me more. Supposedly she screamed for help but died before she got to the hospital.

Her fellow students at Hunter set up a scholarship fund in her name and it is awarded yearly.

I suppose these sorts of things can happen anywhere, but we do expect them to happen in New York. Similarly (but luckily not fatally), a woman very close to my age was brained with a brick by a madman at the corner of 40th and Madison that fall, I believe. Again, I was only a couple blocks away at the time of the incident. She was from Texas. She survived, but man. Random acts of violence galore certainly happen in that city.