This happened many years ago when I lived in Flushing, Queens, New York.
I still remember it was early morning and it was a bit chilly. The air was a bit foggy. It reminded me of one of those weird British Victorian horror shows like Dark Shadows from back in the 60's and 70's.
I recall being a young teen, although I don't remember how old I was at the time, but I wanna say about 14-15 years old.
As I crossed a street to head toward the central part of town, I turned right at the corner and heard a voice call out to me.
"Hey! Djtckrivdtibduijdyjb!"
"Huh?", I said with a face of confusion as I looked into the passenger window of a parked green Ford Taurus.
Inside were two men. A pudgy brown-skinned man with a trimmed goatee, red shirt, jacket, and a hat sat in the passenger seat. Another man, much thinner although I couldn't see him too well sat in the driver's seat.
I was a bit weirded out by the encounter as I didn't understand what the guy had initially said as I walked by.
He spoke again and asked me to come closer to the car, but a part of me sensed danger. I became a bit paranoid. These guys looked shady, and the large man, every time he spoke it sounded like he was purposely speaking gibberish as if to lure me closer to him so I can understand him.
But I felt scared. My internal alarms set off and instead of taking another step forward, I quickly turned and continued to walk up the street. I was a bit weirded out by the whole thing, but thought I was just being overly paranoid. Although the guys in the car looked super suspect, so I did the right thing I thought I could do at that moment which is to just walk away.
I thought that was the end of that... but it wasn't.
Many months later I was laying in my room on a Saturday night watching America's Most Wanted and a story came on of a man who was wanted in Florida for having killed his girlfriend or wife (I couldn't remember the details too good as this was many years ago).
The actor in the dramatization of the crime the criminal had committed looked awfully similar to the large man I had seen sitting in the car that morning a while before, but I didn't think much of it, even after they showed the mug shot because I really didn't connect the dots at that point. I mean, how many chubby brown-skinned guys with goatees does one usually see in the world? Well, at least in my case I've seen a few, especially living in New York City, but what really sent the chills down my spine was when the report stated that the suspect was seen in places like New York.
The car he drove was a green Ford Taurus.
I rose up out of my bed in shock. It finally clicked. I had come across this guy that morning and realized that I had come almost face to face with a murderer.
Had I gotten closer to the car that one morning, who knows what would have happened to me, but sometimes I think about how fortunate I was that day. I think it was only the grace of God that saved me.
There are other times when I think about how I should've called and reported my encounter with this guy, but I was a kid and the fear of uncertainty and being involved in a criminal investigation scared me a bit.
Anyway, that's the story of how I came in contact with an America's Most Wanted criminal. Not a story I often share, but one that I think it's worth telling on here.
Posted by u/Zer0-Attack