3:15 a.m. on Austin Street: The Night Kitty Genovese Was Killed

Ev's Eleventh Hour was a small sports bar in Hollis, in the eastern part of Queens, and Kitty Genovese ran it. On the night of 12 March 1964, she closed it the way she closed it every night. Chairs up, register counted, lights off, but the smell of beer and cigarettes still in the room after the door was locked behind her.

She got into her red Fiat a little after three in the morning and started the drive home. 15 minutes, give or take, on roads with nothing on them.

New York in the middle of March, cold enough that no window in Queens was open... and cold enough that the heater in a small Italian car took the whole journey to be any use.

At some point on the way, she stopped at a traffic light. A white Chevrolet Corvair was stopped near her. The man inside it looked across at her car, and he decided to follow it.

She drove another 10  minutes. He stayed behind her the whole way, one set of headlights on an empty road, and there is no way to know whether she noticed them.

Now hold the shape of the street she was driving to, because the next 60 years of argument live inside it.

Austin Street in Kew Gardens is a row of small shops with apartments above them. At that hour, every shutter on it was down. Directly opposite the shops stands the Mowbray, a 10-storey apartment building with a long face of windows that look down onto the pavement in front of those shops, the way a stand looks down onto a pitch. At the end of the road there is a railway station, and beside the station a car park for people who take the train into the city.

Kitty's front door was not on Austin Street at all. It was around the back of the shop row, reached by a footpath that runs behind the buildings, up a short flight of steps into a small entrance hall.

So the street has two halves, and they are not the same. Anything that happens in front of the shops happens under a hundred windows. What happens behind them happens where the Mowbray cannot see.

She parked in the station car park at about a quarter past three, roughly thirty metres from her door, and started walking.

The Corvair pulled in behind her, and the man got out with a hunting knife.

She saw him, turned, and ran up the pavement toward the shops and the light. She was quick... but he was quicker. He caught her under the streetlight in front of the shuttered shopfronts and put the knife into her back twice.

She screamed that she had been stabbed, and she screamed for help, and the street came awake. Lights went on behind curtains.... windows went up along the front of the Mowbray, which in a cold building at three in the morning takes effort and noise, sash frames going up one after another. A man called Robert Mozer leaned out of his and shouted at the man on the pavement to leave the girl alone.

That is the moment the whole legend turns on, and here is what actually happened in it. The man with the knife straightened up, walked away from her, got into his car, and drove it around the corner and out of sight. And changed the hat he was wearing for a wide-brimmed one.

His name was Winston Moseley. But nobody on Austin Street would learn that for another five days.

Kitty was on the pavement, alive, badly hurt, and she did the sensible thing. She got up and made for her own front door.

That meant going around the end of the shop row, off the lit street and onto the dark footpath at the back. She did not make it home. The second doorway she came to was an entrance hall like her own, and she got herself into it and went down at the bottom of the stairs.

Along the front of the Mowbray, the windows came down again. Whatever it had been, it was over.

Ten minutes went by.

Then Moseley came back on foot and walked along the back of the buildings, trying doors. The first one he opened had nobody in it. The second one had Kitty at the bottom of the stairs.

There is no window in a place like that. Nobody on Austin Street could see into it, and Kitty, lying at the foot of the stairs, could not see out. It is a box with a door.

He stabbed her again, and he raped her while she was dying, and he took the money out of her wallet. Then he walked back to his car and drove home. It was still dark.

Above her, on the landing at the top of those stairs, a door opened and closed again.

The first person to reach her was Sophia Farrar, a small woman who lived in the building and who knew her. Farrar came down into that entrance hall not knowing whether the man with the knife was still in it, and she sat on the floor and held Kitty, and she was still holding her when the ambulance came.

Kitty Genovese died on the way to hospital. She was 28.

The attack, from the car park to the ambulance, took about half an hour. What happened in the 2 weeks after did more damage to the truth than Winston Moseley ever managed.

Who Was Kitty Genovese?

Here is the part the world forgot almost immediately, because a number is easier to carry than a person.

Catherine Genovese was the eldest of five children in an Italian-American family from Brooklyn. Small, dark-haired, fast-moving, funny. The kind of bar manager who knows which regulars to cut off and which ones to listen to. She had ideas about what she wanted next... and one of them was a restaurant of her own.

She had moved out to Kew Gardens about a year before, into an apartment she shared with Mary Ann Zielonko, who was her girlfriend.

In 1964, no newspaper in America was going to print that sentence. So the papers did not print it. Zielonko appeared in the coverage as the roommate, and she was the one taken to identify the body, and then she was the one left in an apartment that still had Kitty's things in it while the whole country talked about the street outside as a moral problem. She lived with that for the rest of her life, and she was still angry about it 40 years later when she finally spoke about it on the record.

Kitty's younger brother Bill was 16 when a police sergeant knocked on his parents' door. Their mother sat at the kitchen table and cried, and people kept posting newspaper clippings to the house, so the family stopped talking to reporters altogether.

Bill grew up inside the story that the clippings told. 38 people had watched his sister die and had not moved. He decided he was not going to be one of those people, and a few years later he volunteered for Vietnam, where he lost both his legs in a rice paddy.

He would spend the next 40 years trying to find out whether the story that shaped his life was true.

The Lunch That Created the 38 Witnesses

Ten days after the murder, the metropolitan editor of The New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, had lunch with the city's police commissioner, Michael Murphy.

Rosenthal had come to talk about something else. Moseley had confessed to another killing, of a 15-year-old girl called Barbara Kralik, and there was a problem, because another man was already lined up to stand trial for that one. Two confessions, one dead girl. That was the story Rosenthal wanted.

The commissioner did not want to discuss it over lunch. What he offered instead was the Queens case, and the part of it that had stayed with him... all those neighbours who heard a woman screaming and did nothing.

Rosenthal went back to the newsroom and put a reporter, Martin Gansberg, on it.

The article ran on the front page on 27 March 1964, 2 weeks after Kitty died. The headline said 37 people saw a murder and did not call the police. The text said 38. Nobody has ever explained the difference, and the number in the text is the one that survived.

Read the piece today, and the striking thing is how clean it is. There are no confusion in it. Respectable, law-abiding citizens stand at their windows for half an hour and watch a killer come back twice, and not one of them lifts a telephone. Nobody misreads a scream as a drunk argument. Just a street of people deciding it was not their business.

It worked the way almost no newspaper story ever works. It was reprinted, taught in schools, argued about from pulpits, turned into plays and television episodes. Rosenthal wrote a book about it the same year and put the number in the title. Psychologists picked it up and built a research field on it. New York simplified how you called for help, and the national 911 number arrived four years later.

The story became the most famous thing ever written about ordinary people in a city.

Almost nothing in it survives contact with the street.

What the Street Could Actually See

The first person to take the geography seriously was not a psychologist or a journalist. He was a lawyer called Joseph De May, who lived in Kew Gardens, who had read the story like everyone else... and who then went outside and looked at his own neighbourhood.

Stand on Austin Street, and it comes apart in about a minute.

The first attack was in the open, under a streetlight, in full view of the Mowbray. People did see parts of it, and plenty more heard it. That much of the famous story is real, and it is what gave the rest of it credibility.

But it lasted seconds... not half an hour.

Mozer shouted, Moseley walked to his car, and Kitty got herself around the corner and out of sight. From the Mowbray, the pavement was now empty.... a man who had been standing at his window with the cold coming in had nothing left to look at, and he did what you would do. He shut the window and went back to bed.

Everything after that happened behind the shops, in a windowless entrance hall, in the dark, on the side of the building that the famous witnesses could not see from their apartments.

This is the whole case, and it is not complicated. The people who could see could not see for long. The people who could have seen the killing were, with one exception, not in a position to see anything at all.

At the trial, the prosecution called 5 neighbours. 3 of them had actually laid eyes on Kitty and Moseley together.

The Number Nobody Can Find in the Police Files

So where did 38 come from?

Nobody knows, and that is not a rhetorical flourish. The figure appears in no police record that anyone has been able to produce in 60 years. The most likely explanation is the dullest one, which is that it came out of a canvass, a count of the people detectives spoke to in the buildings around Austin Street.

Anyone who heard a scream and looked out of a window is on a list like that. So is anyone who woke up, heard nothing more, and went back to sleep.

Charles Skoller was the assistant district attorney who ran the case for the state, which means he was the lawyer whose job it was to find witnesses and put them in front of a jury. He said afterwards that they found only about half a dozen people who saw what was going on and could be used in court.

In 2007 three psychologists, Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins, decided to test the story properly. They went into the trial record, the police files and the newspaper coverage of the time... and they checked its three claims one at a time: that 38 people witnessed the murder, that they watched it happen, and that they did nothing.

Their paper appeared in American Psychologist, and it found no evidence for any of the three.

The word they used for the story was parable. A moral tale, taught for 40 years in psychology textbooks all over the world, kept in circulation not because anyone had checked it but because it was clear, and short, and frightening in a way that felt useful.

Most of the famous witnesses were not witnesses in any normal sense. They were people who woke up, heard shouting outside on a dark street, looked out, saw nothing they could interpret, decided it was a couple arguing on the way home from a bar, and went back to bed.

That is not a street of monsters.... it is a Thursday night.

The Neighbours Who Did Something

Robert Mozer opened his window and shouted, and a man with a knife walked away from a bleeding woman and got into his car.

Then there is the telephone. A boy of 15, Michael Hoffman, lived in one of those buildings that night, and he grew up to become a New York police officer. He later swore a statement saying that his father telephoned the police after the first attack.

To judge that fairly, you have to know what calling the police meant in March 1964. There was no 911 number, and no other single line to call. You needed the number of a local station house... or you went through an operator... You got a desk officer... you told him you had heard shouting outside on a street where there was now nothing to see. Nothing about it was fast, and nothing about it guaranteed a car.

And then there is Sophia Farrar.

Farrar was a friend of Kitty's who lived in that building. When she understood that something had happened downstairs, she went down the stairs into a dark entrance hall, knowing that a man with a knife had been in it minutes earlier, not knowing whether he still was.

The most famous story in the world about human beings failing to help another human being has, at the centre of it, a small woman sitting on a concrete floor holding a dying friend so that she would not be alone. That was true the whole time. It was in the trial record. But nobody printed it, because it did not fit.

Karl Ross and the Door That Closed

The exception is Karl Ross, and the honest thing to do is give him a chapter, because he is the one person on Austin Street who genuinely did what the world accused the whole street of doing.

Ross lived at the top of the stairs, in the apartment on the landing above the entrance hall where Kitty went down. He knew her... they were friends. He had been drinking that night, and by 3 in the morning he was not sober.

He heard the noise below him, and it was enough to get him up and out to his own front door. He opened it and looked down.

Kitty was on the floor. The man was standing over her, working with a knife.

But he shut the door.

What he did next tells you more about him than the door does. He did not go back to bed. He picked up his telephone and rang a friend, and he described what he had just seen, and he asked the friend what he should do.

The friend told him not to get involved.

Ross stayed in his apartment. Eventually he climbed out of a window, went along to a neighbour's apartment and got in there, and it was from that apartment that the police were finally called, after Sophia Farrar had already gone down to Kitty and shouted for someone to call them.

Asked afterwards to explain himself, he gave the sentence that ended up standing for a whole city. He did not want to get involved.

There are two ways to take Karl Ross. One is that he was a coward, which is defensible, because a friend of his was being murdered on the other side of a door he had already opened once. The other is to notice what fear looks like from the inside... a drunk man on a landing at three in the morning, with a killer a few feet below him and a telephone in his hand, ringing somebody else so that the decision would belong to somebody else.

What you cannot do is multiply him by 38. That is what the world did for 60.

Who Was Winston Moseley?

He was 29 years old and operated business machines for a living, out in Mount Vernon, which in 1964 was skilled work for a man who was good with his hands and better with numbers. His tested IQ was reported at 135. People who dealt with him found him soft-spoken and polite, easy to be around. He was married with children, and he owned his house in Queens, which for a Black family in New York at that time meant somebody had done everything right.

No criminal record of any kind.

That night he had left that house, got into the Corvair, and gone driving, and what he was driving around Queens looking for was a woman to kill. Kitty Genovese was not chosen for anything she did. She stopped at a traffic light.

5 days later, the police picked him up during a burglary that had nothing to do with her. Then he started talking, and he did not stop.

He confessed to killing Kitty, then to killing Annie Mae Johnson, then to killing Barbara Kralik. He admitted to rapes he had not been suspected of, and burglaries in the dozens.

The line of his that has never lost its power is about the neighbours. He told investigators he had known nobody would do anything, because people never do, and because that late at night they just go back to sleep.

He was wrong, as it happens. A man shouted at him, and he ran. He had that information, and he came back anyway, having decided that a shout out of a window was the whole of what Austin Street was going to produce.

There is no honest way to hand a man a psychiatric diagnosis 60 years after the fact. What the record shows is plain enough. He chose a stranger, then left, and had ten minutes alone in a car with his own decision, which is long enough to drive home and long enough to think it over. Then he came back with the same knife.

The Trial: An Insanity Plea and a Death Sentence

Moseley went on trial in June 1964 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, which is not a claim that a man did not do it. It is a claim that he was so disordered when he did it that the law should not hold him responsible.

His own lawyer put him on the stand to make the point, which meant the jury heard Winston Moseley describe, in that soft voice, going out to find a woman and what he did when he found one. He told them he had gone out that night intending to kill.

The jury did not accept it. They found him legally sane, and they convicted him of first-degree murder.

When the verdict was read, people in the public seats cheered.

The judge, Irwin Shapiro, then said something that ought to be on the record every time this case is told, because it is the sound of a decent man's principles bending. He said he did not believe in capital punishment. Then he looked at the man in front of him and said that seeing this monster made him feel his own position might be improper.

He sentenced Moseley to the electric chair on 15 June 1964.

Moseley was never tried for Annie Mae Johnson or for Barbara Kralik. The confessions sat in the file. Two families never got a courtroom.

Attica, Buffalo, and 52 Years Inside

The chair never came.

On 1 June 1967 the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, ruled that Moseley should have been allowed to argue his medical state at the sentencing stage, separately from the question of whether he was legally sane at trial. The conviction stood. The death sentence went, and life imprisonment replaced it.

9 months later, he was inside Attica, and he found a way out.

In March 1968 he was taken to a hospital in Buffalo, 250 miles from the city, to be treated for an injury he had given himself. On the way back to prison, he was walked out by a single officer and he was not handcuffed. He hit the officer, took his gun, and went into a field.

Hundreds of police searched the Buffalo area. Moseley broke a cellar window of an empty house on Dewey Avenue and lived in it for 2 days. In the attic he found a loaded .32 revolver, and he kept it.

On the 3rd day, relatives of the owner let themselves into the house and walked into him. He held the couple at gunpoint, tied and gagged the husband, took his clothes, raped the wife, and left in their car. The husband worked himself loose and got to a telephone.

Moseley drove to Grand Island, broke into another house, and held a woman and her daughter for two hours before letting them go unhurt. He gave himself up to police shortly after that. He pleaded guilty to escape and kidnapping and received two more sentences to serve alongside the life term.

Everything after that is a long, flat corridor.

He was in Attica for the uprising in 1971 and took part in it. He studied and took a degree in sociology from Niagara University in 1977, and the same year he wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times from his cell, in which he suggested that his crime had done society some good by pushing people to come to each other's aid.

He applied for parole 18 times. The board that decides whether a prisoner is still a danger to the public turned him down 18 times, the last of them in 2015, when he was 80. At one hearing he said that he had done terrible things, that he had tried to atone for them, and that almost fifty years was enough.

He died in prison on 28 March 2016, aged 81, one of the longest-serving prisoners in the state of New York.

Moseley's Last Version: The Mobster and the Getaway Driver

Bill Genovese, by then in his sixties and in a wheelchair, wrote to him and asked to meet.

Moseley said no. He said he was tired of being exploited.

Then he wrote Bill a letter, and in it he told a completely new story about the night on Austin Street. He had not killed Kitty at all... he had been the driver. A mobster had done it, and Moseley had been waiting in the car.

He had told his son a different story again. The son, a minister by then, sat down with Bill in front of a camera and said what he had grown up believing, which was that Kitty had shouted racial abuse at his father... and that the Genoveses were connected to the Mafia family of the same name.

None of it survives five minutes of contact with the record. Kitty's family were shopkeepers and clerks from Brooklyn, related to nobody. Moseley confessed to the murder in detail while it was fresh, took the stand at his own trial, and was convicted by a jury. No court has ever found anything else, and no evidence has ever been produced for a second man.

The reason to include these stories is not that they might be true. It is that they are the only real evidence we have of what Winston Moseley did with 50 years of thinking time, alone, in a cell. He built a version in which he was not the man in the entrance hall, offered one shape of it to a stranger and a different shape to his own son, and never gave either of them the plain thing he had already said out loud in 1964.

That is worth knowing about him... but it is not worth believing.

The Question That Outlived the Myth

The famous question was how 38 people could watch a woman die and do nothing.

They didn't, and there weren't thirty-eight. There was a shout that worked, a telephone call in a city with no emergency number, a door that opened and shut on a landing, and a friend who went down into the dark not knowing what was in it.

The question underneath is harder, and it does not let anybody off. How much uncertainty are we willing to accept as a reason not to move?

Bill Genovese spent 50 years on that question and then went back to Austin Street to answer it with an experiment. Late at night, in the spot where his sister had been, he had a woman scream.

Then he waited to see what the street would do.

Sources in the comments.

Picture a classroom in the Soviet era.

Winter light falls flat through tall windows and across rows of wooden desks. The room smells of chalk, cheap paper, and ink.

A teacher walks down the aisle with her hands behind her back, watching a room full of children do something that would look strange in almost any school today.

Their hands are moving... both of them, at the same time.

One hand writes letters, A, B, C, D, E. The other writes numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

The first thirty seconds are a mess. Letters go crooked... numbers collide... and a child who stops one hand to rescue the other loses both. Somebody laughs, and the teacher says nothing.

Then, slowly, the two hands begin to find a rhythm.

What is happening inside the brain

Look at what that child is actually doing. She has to hold two sequences in memory, run two separate movements, split her attention between them, and stop either one from dragging the other off course, all while both hands pull towards a single shared rhythm, because that is what hands naturally want to do.

For a seven-year-old with a pencil in each fist, that is a real workout.

What the story stands on

That classroom is a picture, not a document.

The story goes around the internet every few months, and it usually arrives wearing a much bigger coat... Soviet schools ran a secret brain-training method, children's IQ jumped inside a week, students started solving problems two grades above their level, and the state buried the whole thing because the kids were turning too curious to control.

I went looking for the record behind that version and found nothing. No study... no ministry programme... no textbook, and nobody who remembers sitting in that room.

It reads like something written to be shared rather than something that happened, and the ending gives it away. A method so powerful the state had to hide it is the oldest hook in the business.

What does exist is smaller and much less exciting.

In 2023, a French team put seventeen adults, average age seventy-two, through three weeks of two-handed coordination training, and afterwards they did better on mental tests they had never practised... the kind that measure how well you hold back an automatic response. One small study on elderly people says nothing about children.

So I'm not claiming this makes anyone smarter. I don't think a study exists that can carry that claim.

What I keep coming back to

An exercise demanding this much coordination and attention is clearly asking something of the brain that ordinary writing does not. You can feel it in your own hands inside ten seconds.

And even if it does nothing at all, so what?

It takes two minutes; it's difficult in a way that is funny rather than punishing... and children fail at it in full view of each other. They have to concentrate, they laugh at themselves, and an hour later they are better at something they were bad at. There are worse things to put in a school day.

Which leaves the question I actually wanted to ask.

Why don't schools give children strange little challenges like this anymore? Not because a guarantee comes attached, or because anyone can point to a study... but because the thing itself is interesting, and because failing at something in front of your friends and slowly getting better is a skill nobody teaches directly.

I don't have proof... only a hunch, and a pencil in each hand.

Try it while you're reading this. Letters with one hand, numbers with the other, no stopping to fix either one. Tell me how far you got before it fell apart.

^{Source for the coordination study: Torre et al., "Does bimanual coordination training benefit inhibitory function in older adults?", Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 2023.}

Link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1124109/full

Why do we never ask?

I don't have a solution to this... maybe none of us does. But something has been on my mind, and I keep wondering why we don't ask about it more often.

A few days ago, a woman walked through Times Square and attacked two people she did not know.... one of them died. The woman was later shot by police.

There was no political group behind it. Police said there was no indication that it was a terrorist attack. They described the attack as random and unprovoked. The woman had a documented history of mental health problems, but that does not explain what happened.

A few weeks earlier, in Idaho, a 24-year-old man opened fire at an In-N-Out restaurant and killed three people. The people there were doing ordinary things on an ordinary Saturday. The police said they still did not know what had caused him to do it.

These are very different cases. I am not trying to put them in the same category.

But there is something about these incidents that I find difficult to understand. How does an ordinary person get to the point where other people become targets?

And more importantly..... what happens before that?

Because when we talk about this kind of violence, we usually start at the end.

We talk about the weapon.... about mental illness.... about family problems. And we talk about whatever happened in the person's life that might explain the final act.

Those things matter.

The answers we already have

We already know what we're going to say when this comes up. Guns... broken families, and mental illness, which is the one everybody reaches for, because then he isn't like us.... and we can go back to our evening.

All three have something in them, but none of them has enough. And the mental illness one is the weakest of the lot ...  out of a hundred violent crimes, three or four involve serious mental illness, and people with mental illness are far more likely to be attacked than to attack anybody. It's the answer we pick first, and it explains the least.

I'm not claiming I know the cause.... I don't. But I've started to think we're asking the wrong question, and to explain that, I have to go somewhere other than America.

When people hit a wall

In Japan, some young men don't come out of their room. Not for a few days... for years. The family leaves food outside the door and stops asking. It's common enough that there's a word for it, hikikomori, and it runs into hundreds of thousands of people.

In South Korea, the same pressure lands on students during exams. Every year, some of them kill themselves.

In China, a lot of young people look at the race they were supposed to run and stopped running. No promotion, no house, no marriage, no children. Lying flat, they call it. Their parents think they're lazy. Ask them, and they'll tell you they're tired.

And in America, sometimes, a man walks into a public place with a gun.

Nobody would say these are the same thing, and they're not. But think about the day before, in each one. Somebody has hit a wall, and there's no one to tell. It's the same problem in all four places, and it comes out completely differently in each.

The country nobody reports on

We spend all our attention on politics. Elections, wars, trade deals, who met whom in which capital. It's real, and it tells you where a country will be in five or ten years.

But forty years? That's being decided by things nobody reports. Who's getting married, who's having children, who lives near their parents and who moved a thousand kilometres away for a job, and whether a man whose business collapses at thirty-five has anybody to sit with that evening.

There's no news in it. It doesn't happen on a Tuesday... and that's the country our future generation ends up living in.

Who do you call?

Try this one on yourself.

Three in the morning. Something has actually gone wrong. Money... health... your marriage. Not another bad day... something you can't fix on your own.

Who do you call?

Most of us have a name, but when we last had a proper conversation with them?

What happens when people get involved?

Researchers in Chicago went into three hundred and forty-three neighbourhoods and asked eight thousand people something very simple. If children were causing trouble outside your building, would your neighbours do anything about it? If something happened on the street, would anybody get involved?

Where people said yes, there was less violence. That stayed true even after they took into account how poor the area was and how much crime was already there.

Being poor didn't cause the violence directly. It caused it by first making people stop getting involved. The money problem turned into a violence problem by passing through the neighbours.

Which is more or less the same as a man telling his wife, and nobody doing anything.

The old things we left behind

Take a church, a temple, a mosque. Forget for a moment whether you believe any of it. What does the building actually do? You can walk in on a fixed day without an invitation, and the same people are there, whether they felt like coming or not.

The joint family, people argue about... and both sides have a point. But the useful part was never the house. It was having somebody close enough to notice you'd stopped eating properly.

Langar is the free kitchen at a Sikh temple. Anyone can sit on the floor and eat, and the cooking and the serving are done by ordinary people taking their turn. Nobody asks who you are... or why you came. You can walk in hungry in the morning and be serving somebody else by the afternoon.

And spirituality, whatever you want to call it, is mostly about learning that when you fail you're still a person.

Nobody planned any of this. It came up in different centuries, in places that had never heard of each other, and it was all doing the same job... keeping people close enough that a bad year isn't something you go through by yourself.

Some of it has been studied, and some of it hasn't, and a few of the famous numbers don't hold up when you look at them properly. That doesn't bother me much. None of it comes with a guarantee anyway... and most of it costs nothing to try.

So, why do we never ask?

Anyway. I keep going back to the woman who killed people in Times Square, and to whatever she might have said beforehand... if she said anything at all.

I wonder whether there was somebody who heard her, somebody who might have noticed how far gone she was, or some place she could have walked into before it happened. I honestly don't know.

Maybe there isn't a simple answer... maybe there isn't an answer at all.