Robbers Stole Sense of Normalcy

The bloodstains have faded from the pavement along Archwood Street. The bullet holes on the Bank of America wall have been patched. The flowers have stopped arriving at the North Hollywood police station.

The televised gun battle that mesmerized a city--and left two bank robbers dead and 17 bystanders and police officers wounded--is but a distant memory; last week’s news, now given way to gun control debates and speculation about paramilitary groups.

Or is it?

What about among residents of that quiet North Hollywood neighborhood, who were trapped in their homes while their streets were strafed with gunfire? And customers of that Bank of America branch, huddled in fear inside a bank vault, wondering when the rat-a-tat of the machine guns outside would reach them. And passers-by, felled by bullets and forced to cower behind parked cars until the shooting stopped?

The story may have moved off Page 1 and stopped dominating the nightly news, but it will probably haunt the lives of those who lived through it for weeks, months, even years to come. There will be fear and loathing; anger and anxiety; nightmares, tears and temper tantrums.

“These two guys didn’t just rob a bank,” said Barbara Cienfuegos, who coordinates disaster response for the county’s Mental Health Department. “They robbed all of us. . . . They stole our sense of security, of feeling safe and good in our homes, on our jobs, in our community.

“Those are very real losses, and now we have to deal with that.”

*

I have a friend, call her Linda, who manages a Valley outlet of a national restaurant chain. Eight months ago, just after she opened for business one morning, two men barged in with guns drawn, directed a stream of obscenities at her and her customers and demanded money.

She remembers going into a “politeness mode--’yes sir,’ ‘no sir,’ ‘I’m getting it as fast as I can, sir’ “--as she knelt and opened the safe, with the cold steel muzzle of a gun pressed hard against her temple. She handed over the cash and when she stood up, she was staring directly into the barrel of the gun.

“And he was looking at us, and I thought, ‘He’s going to shoot me, he’s going to shoot all of us, just for the hell of it.’ I could feel the color drain out of my face from the fear of it all.

“And that’s the thing I keep playing over in my mind . . . the incredible sense of fear. It felt like an eternity, and I didn’t know if I was going to live or die.”

She lived. The robbers fled, the police were called, the customers were comforted, and the overturned tables and chairs set right. Life went on; the restaurant reopened within hours and Linda and her staff finished their shifts and went home.

Over the next few days, she recounted the robbery to her husband, her children, her friends; everyone told her how lucky she was to have survived unhurt.

But she didn’t feel lucky, or unhurt. She felt scared. And angry. And bewildered by feeling scared and angry. “I was really unprepared for that,” she recalls now.

For weeks, she was afraid to go into stores, restaurants, any place where more than a few people might congregate. “I started worrying for the first time about things like whether the kids were safe at school,” she said. “I never thought about that kind of stuff before.

“It was like suddenly I realized I wasn’t in control . . . that at any moment, anything can happen to you. That’s a hard feeling to handle.”

There were no television Skycams recording her robbery, no dramatic shootouts or police news conferences. But Linda shares with the victims of the North Hollywood siege feelings familiar to anyone who has ever been held up, shot at, raped, beaten . . . those anonymous folks victimized in crimes that never make the news, but whose lives are changed nonetheless.

*

It took five hours for the first round of therapy sessions to conclude at the neighborhood meeting hosted by the city the day after the North Hollywood shootout.

“We had people in tears,” recalls Bob Canfield, a city administrative officer and retired cop who once ran the LAPD’s Crisis Intervention Unit. “We started at 4 p.m., and the counselors didn’t leave until after 9 o’clock.”

They came back two more times, he said; a half-dozen therapists meeting in small groups and one-on-one with anybody who felt the need to talk. That included one small boy from Archwood Street, who drew for his counselor a picture of a man dying in the street, with little red circles--for blood--drawn on his head and legs, to mark the places the boy saw bullets enter the bank robber’s body.

The extraordinary public profile of the crime has prompted an equally extraordinary civic response--including these teams of county-paid counselors ready to help anyone troubled by images of the mayhem.

But the high profile cuts both ways. It’s kind of hard to regain a sense of normalcy while sightseeing souvenir-hunters are trolling your streets by the hundreds, scouring your sidewalk for cartridge cases and peering into your backyard for signs of the bloody siege.

*

And normalcy, after all, is what every crime victim seeks. “That normal expectation of just going to work, going about your business, taking care of your home, . . . that’s the whole thing that gets totally blown away,” said Cienfuegos, a veteran trauma specialist who supervised the “death notification center” after the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Cases like that--and, to a lesser degree, the North Hollywood shootout--require therapists to use a kind of “emotional triage,” she said. “It’s kind of like a rock being thrown into a pond and having a ripple effect.”

“In this case, the people who were shot are in the center. The next ripple would be the people locked in the vault. The next would be the people in the community, although somebody who saw the bank robbers shot and killed, saw the blood and the wounds, they would be in the center too.”

At each remove, she said, the victims are likely to experience a confounding rush of emotions--helplessness, vulnerability, disbelief, anger, fear. And “it’ll take time--sometimes lots of time--and routine to make them go away.”

What therapists do, she said, is help crime victims cope with those feelings. “You let them know that their reactions are normal in response to this incident. Once they believe and understand that, you can physically see the relief in their eyes and in their bodies. . . . You’re basically giving them validation.”

*

That is what my friend Linda says finally pulled her out of a spiral of fear and anxiety over her brush with death. “Finally when I talked with a friend who got really angry over what happened to me . . . that’s when I realized I had a right to be angry and scared.

“After a while, you start to question whether you’re really OK, maybe you shouldn’t talk about it anymore, why do you think about it so much? What I needed was for somebody to tell me it was OK, so I could feel normal again.”

Normal.

It’s hard to know what’s normal anymore.

Walking into a bank to cash your paycheck and being taken hostage may be normal these days. Visiting a neighborhood bar and winding up stretched out on the floor while your handbag is stolen seems to be getting more typical. Having a shopping trip cut short because the mall is closed while police search stores for bank robbers wouldn’t raise an eyebrow anymore.

All these have happened in the San Fernando Valley just in the last few weeks.

Maybe a sense of vulnerability just goes with the territory these days. Maybe the world is indeed as scary as it looked from those Skycams that Friday morning, when high-powered bullets sprayed our streets and our police protectors were forced to run for their lives.

And I don’t know what the therapists can do about that.

* LUST FOR MONEY: Robber was driven by greed, relative says. A1