38 Witnesses

Thirty-Eight Witnesses

The book Thirty-Eight Witnesses was about a murder in Queens, New York. The book is narrated by a journalist for the New York Times Newspaper. What made this murder set apart from others was that it could have been avoided very easily. The journalist sat down with the city councilman for coffee as he usually did every week. However the councilman had something different to tell him this week. He told him of this murder in which their were thirty-eight witnesses to it and nobody would come forward to what happened. The most disturbing thing of all was that not one of the people who witnessed the murder in progress even called the police. If the would have the girl may have stayed alive. Neighbors were awakened by the screams of the woman but they did nothing. This is what happened to twenty-eight year old Catherine Genovese according to the New York City Police. She was returning home from her job at a bar in Hollis. She parked her vehicle in the adjacent lot to her apartment as she always did. She turned off the lights to her car and began to walk the 100ft. Distance to the entrance of her apartment. The entrance to her apartment in in the rear of the building. Catherine then noticed a man at the end of the lot, near a seven story apartment next to hers. She stopped and then headed up the street toward the corner where there was a call box to the police. She made it to the street light in front of a bookstore before the man grabbed her. She screamed. Lights turned on in the apartment which faces the bookstore, windows opened and voices of onlookers could be heard. Miss Genovese screamed: "Oh my God, he stabbed me! Please help me!" From the apartment across the street a man yelled down: "Let that girl alone!" The suspect then looked at him, shrugged and walked toward a car parked a short distance away. Miss Genovese struggled trying to stand. The lights from the apartments went out. Then the killer returned to Miss Genovese, now making her way around the corner trying to make her way to her apartment.