I know that I need to write this down, and I wanted to wait until we returned from Comic-Con to elaborate on what happened Wednesday morning as I’ve alluded to “something happened” and a picture of what looked like a crime scene far in the distance. As I stated in linking to this story – what happened was not pleasant by any definition, and while I won’t describe everything there may be details which may be upsetting. This does involve injury and possible death, and I want to stress that the purpose of this is to document what happened while the memories are still fresh. There is no intention to upset or shock people, and if you feel that after reading this warning you may not want to continue there is no judgement or negative feelings associated with that.
Right now, as of the date that I am writing this (7/24) a large portion of what happened is repressed - meaning I cannot visually recall portions of the event. I have read into the neurochemistry of stressful events, and this does seem to be a normal reaction in which your “fight or flight” sense kicks in and allows you to deal with/manage the event at hand. There are mixed opinions on whether trying to recall these memories is a good idea – it’s something we (myself and Lyssa) will be working on in the coming weeks/months.
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San Diego Comic-Con is an event that myself and Lyssa look forward to every year. We’ve been attending since 2015, and since the first attendance we always look forward to the following year and the insanity that ensues.
This year we arrived a day early (Tuesday) which was fantastic as we were able to pick up our badges and have a fantastic dinner with friends (Taco Tuesday in San Diego – who can question that!). We headed to bed quite early as we had to be up to queue for Conan taping tickets – Lyssa managed to get selected for Wednesday, so we made sure we were up early enough to obtain tickets (three cheers for overselling events).
We got in line at 7:30am and were ~200 people back from the front of the line, which is not bad considering the theatre holds ~1400 people. At 9:45am we received our tickets (terrible location, but we had tickets so who’s counting), and decided at that time to head back to our hotel to grab some breakfast/snacks before heading up to the Laika Live offsite (creators of Coraline, Box Trolls, etc.). We headed down Market St. which is a main east-west thoroughfare in the Gaslamp district of San Diego. We made it to 7th Ave heading east when we both heard a sound like someone falling off a skateboard behind us – we both immediately turned around and saw a man lying on the sidewalk in front of a parkade. As we started to walk towards him we realized, through both visual confirmation and in the ensuing panic, that the man did not fall off the skateboard and had, in fact, fallen/jumped from the parkade above.
As we neared the man I placed a call to 911 and began to assess the situation, along with another bystander who had also called 911 at the same time as myself. We relayed what we could to the dispatchers on the line – the man was breathing, he was unable to respond to questions, and did not appear to be conscious. Neither I, nor the other bystanders touched or moved the man – in this type of situation the severity of the injuries is quite unknown, and nothing will be gained by physically touching or moving the man when it’s known that emergency responders will be present within 1-5 minutes. The other bystander who was also on the line was asked to stay on the phone until emergency services arrived, while I was asked to hang-up and move to the corner of the intersection to assist in directing emergency responders to the exact location.
The San Diego Police were the first to arrive – within 2 minutes of our initial call to 911. Fire/Rescue followed shortly afterwards, with the ambulance arriving a minute or two after that. The scene was secured by SDPD, and we were moved back to the corner while fire/rescue and paramedics attended to the man. During this time, we were both approached by an SDPD officer, as well as contacted via phone by the dispatcher to ensure that we remained on the scene to provide statements and timelines. Both myself and Lyssa provided our statements to the responding officer, and once the man had been loaded into the ambulance and the scene collapsed down to the point of impact we were free to leave, which we did so as soon as we could. We immediately returned to our hotel where we decompressed for a few minutes, after which we resumed with our plans and joined the massive line for the Laika Live event.
Overall, we did enjoy ourselves for the remainder of the convention. We shared this with a few people in our close circle of friends immediately after it happened – outside of that we tried our best to relax and enjoy the reason we were down in beautiful San Diego. During the week if there was a loud noise or crack we both jumped – obviously it was still very fresh in our minds and will be something that I am sure we will continue to think about.
I understand that the entirety of this post is about my/our feelings and opinions on what happened and does not consider the fact that depending on what happened someone may have died. This may have been the result of an accident or may have been intentional. The latter topic is one that is most on my mind as there is truly an epidemic when it comes to mental health, and how our society views and treats those who suffer in silence. I may at some point expand this post going into this discussion – for now I will limit it to the facts of what happened so I have something to reference going forward.
For those that are concerned for my/our mental health – please know we are looking into our available options. We are fortunate to be in Canada where services (counseling, therapy, etc.) are readily available, and covered by insurance/free to access. We are exploring these avenues and will make sure we are utilizing them.
Thanks for reading – feel free to reach out privately (Twitter DM, Google Talk, etc.) if you want to chat.