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| Black Friday, King St., Charleston, S.C. 2008 |
On what should be the busiest shopping day of the year, Black Friday
in 2008 I went for my usual morning walk marching briskly down King
St. There was more activity than usual and a line of locksmith vans
from all over the tri-county. Vandals had
gone up and down the main shopping street squirting superglue into the
door locks of over seventy stores and businesses.
Shop workers were on
the sidewalk calling business owners and managers and doing their best
to get in to get business started. What a mess.
To my knowledge they never solved the crime.
I almost forgot about it until I got an email from a
former Charleston Police Department officer turned author. He had been
here when it happened and let his imagination run with the story.His book is Outspoken and is available on Amazon and covers a lot of familiar territory.
Abraham Lincoln Jenkins is a teenage vandal, social activist, and aspiring revolutionary, but with only four months left until his graduation from high school, Abraham’s lifelong dream of attending Harvard College is put in jeopardy when he learns that he is still in need of two core credit hours in Physical Education. Unfortunately for Abraham, the only available spaces in a P.E. class are as a cadet in the Army’s JROTC program! Told almost exclusively through Abraham’s one-sided complaint letters, OUTSPOKEN is the natural result when the War on Terror collides with the War on Christmas.
OUTSPOKEN was inspired by the 2008 “Black Friday” vandalism on lower King Street, where the suspect remains at large!
Author: James Vachowski
Might check out alibis of employees of the locksmiths!
ReplyDeleteThey never solved it. Never heard much about it afterwards. Weird.
DeleteThat is a peculiar sort of crime...
ReplyDeleteIt is and they picked a day it would get the most attention.
DeleteI remember that! Ugh! Happy Thanksgiving Joan!
ReplyDeleteRemember? Wild!
DeleteI was working at Pete Banis on King that day! Thanks for the memory Joan, Happy Thanksgiving to you!
ReplyDeleteOh, you were right in the middle of it then! The street was crowded with Locksmith vans. I didn't know we had that many in town.
DeleteThe book is a series of letters from a student at Burke High School.
Sounds like a locksmith, or his son, drumming up business....
ReplyDeleteIf so, it worked!
Delete