It’s 2:30 in the afternoon on a sunny Tuesday in May. You’ve just settled in at an outdoor table at the Los Palomitos Taco Shop on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard in the fine San Diego suburb of Clairemont.
You pay little heed to the 16-year-old boy who pulls up in front of the popular taqueria on a bicycle. He leans his bike against the wall.
Just as you are about to plow into your chorizo and potato burrito you hear a voice from the nearby bus stop say, “Put that away, there are children here.” That’s when you notice that the 16-year-old has approached the bus top and is brandishing a gun. Unbelievably, he complies with the old woman’s orders and promptly sheathes the handgun in his waistband, shooting himself in the leg in the process. Dumb shit, you think.
The small crowd at the bus stop begins to disperse; quickly, except for one man, the obvious focus of the now-injured boy’s rage. You have since given up on the idea of finishing that burrito, by the way, what with the little rivulets of blood streaming down the kid’s leg.
The kid takes the gun out of his waistband and fires at one of the fleeing pedestrians, shooting and killing him immediately and then, despite the wounded leg, forgoes his bike and beats feet out of there. The last you see of him is when he jumps the fence but you’ll later learn from the TV news that he ran to a car that was parked about a mile and a half from the crime scene, which was where the cops nabbed him.
The taco shop shooting, as it comes to be called, marks the 29th homicide in San Diego this year, nearly double the number of incidents from this same time last year.
People are on edge all over the place these days, you think.
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Taco's crime blotter is written by the esteemed Rodger Jacobs of 8763 Wonderland
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