A Huge Biker Clamped His Hand Over A Little Girl’s Mouth And Dragged Her Into A Dark Alley — Three Men Charged In To Stop Him, Then He Pointed To The Other End
Part 2
I need to tell you about my brother first. Then I’ll tell you what I saw at the end of that alley.
My little brother’s name was Aram. He was twelve.
In March of 1993, he was walking home from Tenaya Middle School down Olive Avenue. Three blocks from our house. Backpack. Walkman. Probably singing.
At a liquor store on the corner of Olive and Fruit, two men had just robbed the register. They came out the door running. The owner came out after them with a shotgun.
Aram was on the sidewalk.
He was in the way.
I was twenty-one. Stationed at Camp Pendleton. I got the call in the barracks at eleven at night.
He lived nineteen hours.
I’m not telling you that for sympathy. I’m telling you so you understand.
Thirty-two years, I’ve been walking down streets looking at the corners. The doorways. The alleys. Watching for the thing nobody else is watching for. My wife used to say I never relaxed in a city. She was right.
I couldn’t help Aram.
I’ve spent my whole life looking for the next kid on the sidewalk.
That Thursday, I’d parked my Fat Bob on Van Ness Avenue, right at the south mouth of that brick alley. I was early for my barber. So I walked through the alley to Fulton to grab a coffee first.
On my way back through, at about 6:38, I heard sirens.
Far off. Several of them. Heading this way.
I didn’t think anything of it. Downtown Fresno. Sirens happen.
Then two men came around the corner of Van Ness at a dead run.
Black hoodies. Hoods up. Bandanas pulled down off their faces, hanging around their necks. One heavy, one skinny. Each with a backpack, stuffed full, zippers half open.
They stopped at the corner. Looked up and down Van Ness. Looked back the way they came.
They were looking for a car. I found out later their getaway driver panicked when he heard the sirens and took off without them.
The heavy one swore. Loud. I heard him from forty yards.
Then he saw my bike.
He ran to it. Grabbed the handlebars. Started yanking on the ignition, jamming his fingers into the keyhole like that’d do something. The skinny one was spinning in circles, panicking, looking everywhere.
And when the heavy one bent over my bike, his hoodie rode up.
Tucked into the back of his waistband was a black pistol.
I backed into the shadow of the alley wall.
I took out my phone. Dialed 911. Kept my voice down.
“Fulton and Van Ness. South end of the brick alley by the old bank. Two men. Hoodies. One armed. Handgun. They’re trying to steal a motorcycle. I think they’re running from whatever those sirens are.”
The dispatcher was already typing.
“Sir, there’s been an armed robbery two blocks from you. Units are en route. Do not engage. Stay where you are.”
“I’m staying,” I said.
I was.
Then I looked back toward Fulton.
And saw the little girl.
Part 3
She was walking down the Fulton sidewalk toward the corner. Toward Van Ness.
The heavy man was still bent over my bike. The skinny one was pacing in the street. Gun in plain sight now. He’d pulled it out. Holding it down along his leg. Looking up and down the block like a cornered animal.
She was holding her pink card. Looking down at it. Smiling.
She was maybe forty feet from the corner.
Here’s what I knew.
Two desperate men. One gun. Sirens closing in. No car. No way out.
Men like that do terrible things when they’re cornered. They grab whatever’s close. A hostage. A shield. A bargaining chip.
A small child walking alone around a corner, straight into the middle of them.
I’d seen it happen. Not here. In places I don’t talk about.
And once, on Olive Avenue, to my brother, when I wasn’t there.
I had maybe ten seconds.
If I yelled to her, she’d stop. Turn. See a huge stranger in a dark alley calling to her. She’d scream. She might run. Maybe the wrong way. Toward the corner.
And those two men would hear it.
I didn’t yell.
I walked out of the alley mouth behind her. Quiet. Fast.
I scooped her up from behind. Arm around her waist. Hand over her mouth.
And I pulled her into the dark.
She fought like a wildcat.
She kicked my shins. She twisted. She bit my palm. Hard. She screamed into my hand so loud I could feel it in my bones.
Her pink card fell out of her fingers and landed face-up on the bricks.
CHÚC MỪNG SINH NHẬT MẸ.
Behind me, a woman pushing a stroller on Fulton saw it all.
She screamed.
“HE’S TAKING HER! HE’S TAKING THAT LITTLE GIRL! SOMEBODY HELP!”
I pulled the girl twenty feet into the alley. Behind a stack of wooden pallets leaned against the bank wall. Deep shadow.
I got down on my knees.
I kept her against my chest. One arm around her. One hand over her mouth.
She was sobbing. Shaking. Making a high, terrified sound in her throat.
I put my mouth by her ear. As quiet as I could.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” I whispered. “I promise. There’s bad men. Stay quiet. Please.”
She didn’t believe me. Why would she?
She kept crying.
Louder.
At the far end of the alley, the skinny man turned his head.
Toward the sound.
Toward us.
He took a step. Then another. Peering into the dark.
I stopped breathing.
Then the three men came around the corner from Fulton.
Manny Ortega, who owns the taco truck parked at Fulton and Kern. Fifty. Big. A white apron stained with salsa. A metal spatula in his hand.
A kid named Tyler, twenty, in a Fresno State hoodie. Just walking home from a class at the downtown campus.
And Darnell Hayes. Forty-two. A steel worker on the high-rise going up on Tulare Street. Reflective vest. Hard hat still on. He’d grabbed a piece of rebar off a construction dumpster on his way.
They came in hot. Running. Shouting.
They saw me. On my knees in the dark. My hand clamped over a crying nine-year-old’s mouth.
Manny’s face went purple.
“Let her go,” he said. “Let her GO, you piece of—”
He raised the spatula. Darnell raised the rebar.
They were coming at me.
I didn’t stand. I didn’t let go.
I raised my free hand. Open. Flat. Then one finger to my lips.
Shh.
They stopped.
Confused.
Then I pointed. Past them. Down the long dark alley. To the other end. To Van Ness.
To the streetlight there.
To the skinny man standing at the alley mouth, peering in, with a pistol in his hand.
And the heavy one behind him, still yanking at my motorcycle.
All three of them turned.
All three of them looked.
And all three of them went absolutely silent.
Manny lowered the spatula. Slowly. Darnell crouched. Tyler’s mouth dropped open, and Darnell grabbed him by the hoodie and pulled him down behind the pallets.
Four grown men and a little girl. In the dark. Behind a stack of pallets.
Nobody breathed.
The little girl had stopped struggling. She’d felt them go quiet. Kids can feel it. She’d stopped crying too. She was just trembling against my chest, her eyes huge, staring at the skinny man at the end of the alley.
He took one more step in.
Squinted.
Then a siren whooped. Close. Right on Van Ness. Red and blue lights swept across the alley walls.
The skinny man spun around.
And ran.
Part 4
Three minutes. That’s how long it took from my 911 call to handcuffs.
Two Fresno PD cruisers came screaming down Van Ness from opposite directions. Boxed them in. The heavy man was still trying to start my bike when the first officer yelled at him to get on the ground.
He did.
The skinny one made it twenty yards before an officer tackled him into a hedge outside the county building.
The pistol skidded across the sidewalk.
Their backpacks were full of gold. Necklaces. Bracelets. Rings still on velvet display pads. Watches with the price tags still hanging.
I took my hand off the little girl’s mouth.
She didn’t scream.
She just looked up at me. Shaking. Tears and snot all over her face. Her eyes going from me to the police lights to me again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I scared you. I’m sorry I grabbed you.”
She didn’t say anything.
I showed her my hands. Open. Empty.
“You’re safe now,” I said.
Manny Ortega crouched down next to us. The big taco man. He set his spatula on the bricks. He looked at me. Then at her.
“Mija,” he said gently, in Spanish first, then English. “It’s okay. He was protecting you. You see those men? He was hiding you from them.”
She looked at Manny. Then at the police. Then back at me.
Then she reached out with one shaking hand and grabbed the front of my vest.
And held on.
Darnell Hayes was standing behind us with the rebar still in his hand. He set it down very carefully against the wall.
“Man,” he said quietly. “I was gonna hit you with that.”
“I know.”
“I was gonna hit you as hard as I could.”
“I know. I’d have done the same.”
He shook his head. Took off his hard hat. Ran his hand over his face.
Tyler, the college kid, was sitting on the bricks with his back against the bank wall, hugging his knees. Pale. Breathing fast. Darnell sat down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
An officer came down the alley with a flashlight. Sergeant Lupe Aguilar. Fresno PD. I’d talked to her on the phone a minute before. She’d heard my voice on the 911 recording.
She saw the girl holding my vest.
“Is she okay?”
“Scared,” I said. “Not hurt.”
Sergeant Aguilar knelt down in front of her.
“Hi, sweetheart. What’s your name?”
The girl swallowed.
“Mai,” she whispered.
“Mai. That’s a pretty name. Where were you walking to, Mai?”
Mai looked at the end of the alley. At the corner of Van Ness. At the flashing lights.
“My mom’s store,” she said. “I’m going to my mom’s store. I walk there every day after tutoring.”
Sergeant Aguilar smiled. “What’s your mom’s store?”
Mai said it.
And Sergeant Aguilar’s smile disappeared.
Part 5
“Nguyen Fine Jewelry,” Mai said. “On Van Ness. By the fountain.”
Sergeant Aguilar looked at me.
I looked at her.
The jewelry store that had just been robbed. The armed robbery two blocks away. The one the dispatcher told me about.
Nguyen Fine Jewelry.
Mai saw our faces change. She didn’t understand. She was nine.
“Today’s my mom’s birthday,” she said. “I made her a card.”
She looked around. At the bricks. Searching.
Manny Ortega walked back toward the alley mouth on Fulton and picked something up off the ground. Pink construction paper. A little damp. A boot print on one corner.
He brought it back. He brushed it off on his apron. He handed it to her.
CHÚC MỪNG SINH NHẬT MẸ.
A woman with long black hair and a crown.
Mai held it against her chest.
Sergeant Aguilar keyed her radio and asked about the store owner.
The answer came back in a crackle.
Female. Thirty-eight. Minor head laceration. Struck with a pistol when she refused to open the safe. Conscious. Refusing transport. Asking for her daughter.
Asking for her daughter.
Mai’s mother had been standing behind her counter when two men in bandanas came through the door at 6:31. One of them pointed a gun at her face. Told her to empty the cases.
She did.
Then they told her to open the safe in the back.
She didn’t.
Not because of the money. Because the clock on the wall said 6:33.
Her daughter walked from her tutoring center on Fulton to the store every evening at 6:40. Every day. Down Fulton. Around the corner onto Van Ness. In the front door.
Seven minutes.
If she opened that safe, they’d spend ten minutes back there. They’d still be in the store when Mai walked in.
So she stalled. She said she didn’t know the combination. She said only her husband did. She lied.
The heavy one hit her in the side of the head with the gun.
They grabbed what they had and ran out the front door. Toward Fulton. Toward the corner.
The exact corner Mai was walking toward.
If I hadn’t seen them at my bike.
If I’d been inside the barbershop instead of getting coffee.
If I’d called out to her instead of grabbing her.
If she’d turned that corner fifteen seconds later.
She’d have walked straight into two cornered, armed, panicking men with sirens closing in and no car.
The men who’d just pistol-whipped her mother.
We walked her to the store. Me on one side. Sergeant Aguilar on the other. Manny, Darnell, and Tyler right behind.
Mai held my hand the whole way.
Nguyen Fine Jewelry was full of police. Broken glass on the floor. Empty display cases. Crime-scene tape at the door.
A woman was sitting on a stool behind the counter with a paramedic pressing gauze to her forehead. Small. Long black hair pulled back. A white blouse with blood on the collar.
She saw Mai in the doorway.
She knocked the paramedic’s hand away and came over that counter. Over it. I’ve never seen anything like it.
She dropped to her knees in the broken glass and grabbed her daughter and held her and started sobbing in Vietnamese. I didn’t understand a word. I didn’t need to.
Mai held up the pink card.
“Happy birthday, Mẹ.”
Her name was Thu Nguyen. Thirty-eight. She’d owned that store for eleven years. Her parents came from Saigon in 1981 and started it as a little repair counter inside a pawn shop.
When Sergeant Aguilar told her what happened in the alley, she looked at me for a long time.
The big tattooed biker in the doorway of her store.
She stood up. She walked over. Small. Barely up to my chest.
She took both of my hands in hers. Looked at the bite mark Mai left on my palm. Still bleeding a little.
She held my hands for a long time.
She didn’t say anything.
Then she bowed her head. All the way. Her forehead almost touching my knuckles.
I told her about Aram that night. I don’t know why. I hadn’t told a stranger in thirty years.
Twelve years old. Walking home. Wrong corner. Wrong minute.
“I wasn’t there,” I said. “I couldn’t do anything.”
Thu looked at her daughter, asleep now on a folding chair in the back room, still holding the card.
“Today you were there,” she said.
Part 6
The two men were charged with armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted vehicle theft.
The last one made me laugh. They tried to steal a motorcycle without a key.
Two weeks later, Thu Nguyen and her husband, Kevin, came to my upholstery shop on Blackstone.
They brought a cake. A big one. Vietnamese style, with fruit on top and light whipped cream. And a manila envelope.
Inside was a bankbook. A savings account at a credit union downtown.
In my name.
Ten thousand dollars.
“We want you to have this,” Kevin said. “For what you did.”
I pushed it back across my workbench.
“No.”
“Please—”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t do it for money. I didn’t do anything anybody shouldn’t do.”
Thu looked at me.
“Then what do we do with it?” she asked. “We can’t keep it. It’s yours. It was always going to be yours.”
I thought about it for a long time.
I thought about that alley. How dark it was. Twenty feet in and you couldn’t see your own hand. One broken streetlight at the Van Ness end. Nothing at the Fulton end.
If there’d been light in that alley, those men would have seen me. Maybe they’d have seen her coming before I did.
Maybe Aram’s street would’ve been different too, if somebody had been watching. If there’d been light.
“How many dark alleys are there downtown?” I asked.
Thu didn’t know.
I didn’t either.
We found out.
The Central Valley Riders walked every alley in downtown Fresno that December. Thirty of us. At night. With flashlights and a city map. We counted.
Fourteen alleys with no working lights.
Fourteen places where a kid could walk past the end and nobody would see what was waiting.
The ten thousand dollars went into a fund. Thu named it. The Alley Light Fund.
The Downtown Business Association matched it. Then the city. Then a few hundred people who read about it in the Fresno Bee.
By spring, there was enough.
The Central Valley Riders did the installing. Half of us are electricians or contractors anyway. We worked on Saturdays. Darnell Hayes brought his crew from the high-rise. Manny Ortega fed everybody tacos for free.
LED floodlights. Motion sensors. Solar panels on the rooftops.
Fourteen alleys.
All of them lit.
Mai helped too.
She’d come with Thu on Saturday mornings and stand at the end of each alley we were working on, holding a flashlight, telling us where it was still too dark.
She was very bossy about it. She was usually right.
She started calling me Chú Hẻm.
I asked Thu what it meant.
Thu laughed. “Uncle Alley.”
Part 7
The last light went up in the alley between Fulton and Van Ness. The one.
Mai turned it on herself.
She stood at the Fulton end with Thu and Kevin and Manny and Darnell and Tyler and thirty bikers, and she flipped the breaker on the box Darnell built, and the whole alley lit up white.
The pallets were gone. The shadow was gone. You could see all the way to Van Ness. To the corner. To the spot where my bike had been parked.
Everybody clapped. Manny whistled with two fingers.
Mai looked down the length of it for a long time.
Then she looked up at me.
“Chú Hẻm,” she said. “It’s not scary anymore.”
She’s ten now.
She still walks from her tutoring center to her mom’s store every evening at 6:40.
Down Fulton. Past the taco truck. Past the alley. Around the corner onto Van Ness.
Some evenings, I’m parked on Van Ness at the end of the alley, eating Manny’s tacos on the seat of my Fat Bob. I don’t tell her I’m coming. I just show up sometimes.
She always sees me.
She stops at the Fulton end of the alley, where she can see straight through to me under the lights.
And she waves with her whole arm.
“CHÚ HẺM!”
I wave back.
Then she walks around the corner to her mother’s store.
I watch until she’s through the door.
Every time.
Somebody should.
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