When I was in college, a woman was killed in my neighborhood.

(”My neighborhood,” the one I live in now, not “my neighborhood,” the one I lived in in college. As I remember my college neighborhood, the bodies were stacked like cordwood, waiting to be picked up out on the curbs along the block. My junior or senior year, a guy came out of our Walgreens and got a shotgun blast to the face in broad daylight. The university’s advice? “You guys… you guys prolly shouldn’t go to that Walgreens.” They were baffled that everyone left campus on the weekends. Baffled.)

Actually, the woman was only in my neighborhood by a technicality when she died; the highway slices through it like a deep concrete gash, and she was cruising down the highway when she died. She was on her way home from what I imagine was an exhausting night’s work, in those wee small hours of the morning that feel just moments away from becoming a lot bigger and heavier. She was an exotic dancer over on the city’s east side. She and her husband had brought their baby here from the former Soviet Union and current Whatever-the-Hell to make a new life for themselves. What makes a Russian émigré choose St. Louis, Missouri out of all the new home towns on earth, I can only guess. Perhaps they were nostalgic for the stinging cold. So, she came here to make a new life for her baby and her family, and the life she ended up with was as a stripper on the east side. It supported the family, and work was work.

So, this anonymous Russian exotic dancer had what was presumably another day at the office and headed home with a purse full of cash and the satisfaction of a job well done. As she was driving home, however, a couple of the kids in my neighborhood had gotten bored and had snuck out of the house in search of some amusement. I imagine them restlessly roaming the streets looking for diversion, walking down the same sidewalks I do whenever I’m bored and decide to go out for a little exercise.

On the other hand, maybe they had planned that night for a week. It might have been days earlier when they first found the piece of loose concrete somewhere in our neighborhood, roughly the size of a bowling ball and three times as heavy. They might have kept it hidden in someone’s basement for days, gleefully plotting their midnight mischief with it. Or they might have just stumbled across it that night in their stroll that very evening and spontaneously decided, “You know, bowling ball-sized chunks of concrete are very rare finds. We’d better drop this one onto a passing car.”

(There was almost a grim joke there about the rarity of their find, and how “bowling ball-sized chunks of concrete don’t just fall from the sky, you know.” I opted not to put it in there, but inhuman monster that I am I just can’t keep it to myself.)

So some kids from my neighborhood (I presume kids, and I presume from around here; I never heard about anyone getting picked up) walked out of their houses in the middle of the night with a giant piece of loose concrete and took it to one of the little bridges over the highway. The fence on the bridge was too high and the concrete too heavy to lift, so they diligently and with considerable effort pulled and stretched the bottom links of the fence until their man-made boulder could get through. Eventually, after their hard work was finished, they waited for some headlights. Here it comes, this is the one this is the one. Ready? Ready? Here we go, okay… okay… now!

And with that, a Russian immigrant who was stripping to feed her kid was killed by someone who had never met her before and hadn’t even seen her face as he was killing her. The paper said the impact of the concrete, which by some awful miracle had landed directly through her windshield, had killed her instantly. So at the very least, she hadn’t died in the ensuing car crash, frantic and shocked and terrified and confused. The block of pavement had just obliterated her head before she even had an instant to ponder why all of this was happening to her, leaving her car to crash itself and the rest of us to ponder for her.

Last I heard, her husband was telling reporters that he was going back to Russia where the misery was more predictable.

I can only imagine what it was like to be one of the kids on the bridge. Did they freak out when the car crashed? What did they think was going to happen?

Did they realize someone was dead?

Was that the idea?

Of all the city’s tragic stories over the years, this story has haunted my memory like none other. It may have been because I could so vividly imagine what it must have been like to be every person in the story. Every time I had driven under that bridge and saw someone crossing it, I winced in anticipation of spit or a pebble hitting my windshield, even though it never came. Mostly, though, I think it was because it was one of the first genuinely horrible things that I can remember happening in a neighborhood I’d been in.

Of course, I now live in that neighborhood, and I walk those very streets nearly every evening. On my walks, I almost always cross the bridge where the killers sat that night. As I do, I often think briefly about the woman who died below, and I guess until the other night I was always too lost in my own head to notice that nobody has ever repaired the fence.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw it. The bottom of the fence has a huge tumescent bulge in it where someone either pulled at it with great force or pushed something too big underneath it, distending the links beyond recognition. This means one of two things:

- the barrier has never been fixed, and the handiwork of the killers all those years ago is still there like some kind of twisted monument

- the barrier was fixed, and someone is in a house near me right now planning to do it all again.

Neither option exactly fills my heart with song.

I wish I could say that I was still thinking about the fence and its vandals because of the series of “entertaining” carjackings last week (for more, see http://www.stltoday.com , whose shitty interface is preventing me from linking to the actual story), but in reality (stupid and petty though it may be) I have been preoccupied because of the people I’ve encountered online, of all places, in the last few days. It seems like everywhere I looked this week, someone was propagating a virus or trolling a message board or cheating at a game. There was an unusual spike this week in people who saw a thing of beauty and thought, for no real reason, “How can I ruin this before it brings anyone else joy?” People having a laugh by attacking strangers and picking on little girls. This week was a valuable but unwelcome reminder that there are people just like you and me who enjoy making the world an uglier place to live. And I can’t help wondering if I’ve been one of them.