A STRANGER STEPS IN
Onlooker jumps into action to help woman when he hears shots
Friday, August 13, 2010 02:50 AM
BY JIM WOODS
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The night of May 27 was unseasonably warm for spring.
Alix Reese and a friend were enjoying ice cream at Jeni's in the Short North when the friend decided she wanted to go to her boyfriend's house on the East Side and asked Reese to give her a ride.
The favor changed the 25-year-old Reese's life forever.
Calvin Giles was in the second-floor bedroom of his Atcheson Street house at 11p.m. on May 27 when he heard a gunbattle on the street below.
When night falls, gunshots are a familiar hazard in the Mount Vernon neighborhood on the Near East Side where he used to live. Most people stay inside when they hear them, but Giles reacted differently.
Reese and her friend had unwittingly driven into the middle of a gang fight as she slowed for a speed bump on Atcheson, just east of Trevitt Street. The two rival gangs were squaring off on opposite sides of the street. Giles remembers hearing shots from at least two guns.
As he looked out an upstairs window, he also realized that someone was in trouble.
"I saw the car, and it was like it was drifting and ran into another car that was parked," Giles said recently. "I knew whoever was in the car got shot."
He told his wife, Ericka, to call 911 and ran out of the house. By then, the shooting had stopped, and the gang members had scattered.
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