“And I only saw her because of those kids. They were being asses to her.”
“In what way?”
“Trying to push her down, I think. She did go down, and she looked like she was injured. I wondered about going over and helping her, but she got back up, and the kids lost interest in her.”
“Interesting.” Kate’s senses were on high alert. Candy had said something about her friend group wanting her to push a blind woman. “Could you recognize the kids?”
Bill shrugged. “They hang around here a lot,” he muttered. “It’s not like it’s hard to miss them. There’s a group of six of them.”
“When you saw the other accident, the second one in a week,” Rodney stepped in, “did you recognize the victim?”
He shook his head. “No, but she didn’t look so good. Honestly she appeared to be high.”
“High drunk or something?”
He shrugged. “I tell you what. The kids who come off that university, some of them are great and really intense. Some of them look like they’re completely stressed out, and others look like they’re off on their luck. And, at that accident, she looked like she was out of luck.”
“Right.”
“Another guy was there, and that group knocked him down too.”
“Interesting, very interesting,” Kate muttered. “We did hear complaints about some kids knocking around other people, who were injured and the like.”
“Well, this woman from that group knocked somebody else down—he was disabled—but it wasn’t as bad as what the group did to the blind woman. I know she was sobbing and trying hard to not appear any more vulnerable than she was. I was getting ready to go out and pound the crap out of those little shitheads.”
“How many were there?”
“There is a group of them, usually a couple women with some guys, so about six total in their little gang, and they were hassling the one woman pretty badly.”
Kate nodded slowly. “Yeah, let’s see if it’s the same group I was thinking of. She was supposed to knock down the blind woman.”
“She didn’t. One of the other guys did, but they were hassling her pretty good about something.”
Kate pulled out her phone and brought up a picture of Brandon. “Does this look like one of them?”
“Oh, hell yeah, that’s one of them.” Bill stared at the photo. “That kid needs to be taken down a peg or two.”
“Absolutely. Now, the question is, did he do anything more serious than hassling a blind woman around?”
“Meaning, he had to do something more serious for you to come?” he asked. “What the hell’s wrong with this world?”
“Oh, I get it, but we’re also hamstrung and have to work within the law.”
“See? This is why I couldn’t be a cop any longer. I just want to pound him into the ground and forget about evidence or finding him guilty. What I saw out there? That was just BS.”
“And the guy who they did knock down?”
“Yeah, it was the one woman who did it, and you’re right, she looked like she was being pressured.”
“Nice, nicegroup,” she said.
“That’s when the cyclist jumped ahead, maybe to get away from them. I’m not sure. Anyway, the cyclist got hit by the car and went down, and, after that, they scattered.”
“But you don’t think the group had anything to do with that?”
“The cyclist definitely got hit by the vehicle, and I don’t know why else she would have jumped ahead into the traffic, besides trying to get away from that group. Hell, I would have too. Unfortunately, in this case, it was fatal.”
“Yes, it was. When you say they surrounded the person on the bike, do you know if they came up on one side or the other?”