Ron and I had very little furniture until we bought the house. At one point our living room furniture consisted of a few plastic lawn chairs. We didn't have a TV for years.
We lived in a very bad neighborhood. There was a complex down the street where they had a prostitute/meth addict, unsavory people, etc. There was a family lived there.
The parents were not native-born. Their daughter was. The mother was a waitress and worked a restaurant we used to frequent sometimes. Rarely, she would bring her daughter to work and the little girl would sit quietly at a table. Cute little girl, sweet mother.
One day we left the apartment and police cars everywhere, we went back in and Ron turned on his scanner, a paramedic was doing CPR on someone en route to the hospital. We could hear the compressions. Later on we found out it was the little girl, she had died at the hands of her father. Her mother had to work and for whatever reason did not bring the little girl to work that day, the father watched her.
And killed her, I won't say how, it is awful. The mother had to be hospitalized, and went back to her country. The neighbors had a "fire sale" of all the goods left behind and gave her the money.
Ron and I found a 70's era couch that was nice and long, we bought it for $15 and took it home (at that time, we didn't realize who had owned it). We noticed a strong smell of urine when we got into the apartment.
And we realized, to our horror, we had bought the couch the poor little girl had slept on, and apparently peed on, every night. We should have just taken it to the curb but we did need a couch and could not afford a "decent" one.
So I bought a bottle of Simple Green. We took the cushions off and filled the bathtub with a solution of simple green and hot water, soaked the cushions, wrung them out as best we could, did it again, until the worst of the odor had dissipated.
But for me, I guess the scent of Simple Green is inextricably linked to my depression and horror at the event. Every time I smell it I get triggered.
I remind myself it is just a cleaning product but it is pervasive, especially when I used it to clean up the urine spills in Ron's room, the smell of urine mixed with simple green, that was really bad.
And I'm sure the mother remarried and had other children, hopefully went on to have a pretty happy life, but I may need to use another cleaning product.
2 comments:
What year did that happen, Heather? I live on the Penninsula in a city close to where you lived, and I also went to the same college as you did. That's such a sad story, and it's understandable that the smell of that product would trigger you.
I forget what year it happened but between 1994 and 1998, because when Shari stayed with us she slept on the couch, but when Amy stayed in 94 it wasn't there yet.
This was not released to the media but overheard on the scanner he basically raped her to death, and it was her third birthday. But one of the nurses knew a guy in corrections where he was sentenced and they made sure the inmates knew he was a baby raper "And he's a little scrawny guy, too". He pled out rather than have the abuse come out.
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