Cradling the sawed-off baseball bat in her arms, 68 year-old grandmother-of-six Djieudee Bast-Hernandez remembered the day she had received the tire-thumper as a gift from the deputy mayor of Los Angeles. Standing on the corner of Vermont and Leeward Avenues, in the middle of Koreatown and smack-dab in the heart of territory controlled by the MS-13 gang, Ms. Bast-Hernandez shifted the bat to her right hand in one swift motion, dodging slightly to the side and striking with an upward thrust at the left temple of the urban youth standing in front of her, whom she guessed was no older than her youngest grandson. Ignoring the disbelieving gazes of the few people who had paused to watch her get robbed, Djieudee gingerly retrieved her purse from the young man's limp hands, kicked his knife down a storm-drain, straightened her patterned-silk blouse, checked her hair in the window of a nearby storefront, and slipped the bat back into the fold of her hand-knitted sweater.
Controlling the adrenaline-shakes and waiting to cry until she was inside her apartment and had locked the door, Djieudee allowed herself two whole minutes of stress-induced emotional release before going into the kitchen to make tea. Sitting at her favorite chair by the window and watching the afternoon clouds caress the top of the towers Downtown, Ms. Bast-Hernandez began to clean the bat while embedding the day's violent turn of events firmly into her long-term memory, where they settled in nicely.
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