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Police Beat

The Emissions of a Laser/West Seattle/Sun May 2/12:05 am: Officer Heffernan writes: "I was with several other units on Alki Ave SW and at Alki Beach Park. We had been in the area closing the park and trying to get people to move along. I was sitting in my patrol car. This is a fully marked patrol vehicle with an overhead light. I was in full uniform with my driver's-side window down. My vehicle was sitting under a row of streetlights that were on both sides of the street making my vehicle very visible. Suddenly my attention was drawn to a small blinking red light that I saw coming from the front-porch area of a house on the west side of 57th Ave SW.

"At first I couldn't tell what the blinking red light was. Then I saw that the light was the emission of a laser because I was able to see where the laser had struck a vehicle that was between myself and the source of the laser. I then looked down at my chest to see if the laser was hitting me, as it was erratic. Just as I looked back up, the laser hit me with a sweeping blow across both my eyes, from my right to my left. I then put my car in drive and drove toward the source of the laser.

"Simultaneously, I turned on my driver's-side spotlight and trained it on the front porch of the house. I then stopped my car in front of the house. There were four people standing on the front porch of the house. I got out of my car and asked them, as a group, who had the laser. The suspect then told me that he had one and pulled it out of his pocket. I then had him walk toward me and give me the laser. I asked him why he pointed it at me. He did not answer.... I then advised the suspect that I was going to have to write up a report listing him as the suspect and requesting charges. I took the laser and placed it into evidence."

The Sign of the Four/London, Great Britain/Fall 1889/6:50 pm: Doctor Watson writes: "It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzling fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop windows streamed out into the steamy vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light--sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more...."

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