Myth and Menace in Prospect Park
“Ice pick dog stabber nabbed!” screamed the headlines. Here’s how I saw it differently
They say, “write what you know,” and I’ve always wanted to figure out a way to write about Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. I go there every morning with my little mutt for off-leash hours (that is before 9 a.m., for all you uninitiated folks). I feel like it’s basically my backyard. I soak up the sun there in the summertime, my feet bare in the grass. I know six different ways to the Nethermead, all of them equally indirect. I know exactly how many turtles live near the dog beach. There’s nothing like the soul-affirming emptiness of a mid-winter walk there, watching striations of the sunset sky emerge in sharp lines of pale pink and ice blue and yolk yellow.
I’ve always wanted to write about Prospect Park, but it’s hard to capture the immensity of it. This is the park that Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux designed after Central Park. Unencumbered with the laundry list of restrictions they had for Manhattan’s crown jewel, the landscape architects plotted the park around three regions that you could get lost in: meadow, lake and wood.
Long Meadow, which might be considered the teeming heart of the immense project, contains a vanishing point. Standing in the middle of it, you’re enfolded completely in the architects’ famous brainchild. Cut off from the noise of traffic and the urban sprawl, you can’t see the end of all that green.
Prospect Park was meant to be an idyllic meeting place where divisions of geography and economics would disappear. It’s bounded by neighborhoods that run the gamut, including Park Slope (home of Senator Chuck Schumer and the yuppie breeder denizens famously skewered by Amy Sohn in a series of comic novels), Windsor Terrace, predominantly Caribbean Flatbush and Prospect Heights, which is flanked by the elegant Grand Army Plaza, the golden facade of the Brooklyn Public Library and the glass condo where Jay Z has a residence.
While Park Slope, with its easy stereotypes of attachment parents and artisanal pizza, is easy to peg, the park instantly seemed to occupy a different kind of psychic space when I first moved to the neighborhood ten years ago. Through years of lazy exploration, it gradually became less immense and forbidding. There are the stairs leading up to the top of the mountain on which you can view the entire lake (and much of Brooklyn), the shadowy men who cruise the area around the Vale of Cashmere, the tot lots, the loop where you have to dodge amped up cyclists in colorful jerseys.
Of course, getting a dog brought a new level of initiation into the park’s many layers and mysteries. Over the past four years I’ve daily explored the park’s every contour with my four-legged companion. Dog owners as a bloc are so powerful and omnipresent that many of us refer to the place generically as the “dog park,” even though the five-hundred-acre park contains a zoo, an ice skating rink, a concert stage, baseball fields and several waterfalls.
The dog park has its own culture and community, and it’s hard to capture the glacial pace at which relationships develop. Time seems to stand still as you pick up and leave conversations that range from mundane to profound with your neighborhood blogger, a radio reporter or movie director. Who knows? We never talk about our jobs. It just isn’t done.
And so I’ve always wanted to write about Prospect Park, but it seems that nothing ever happens there.
That is, until late last week, when a threat penetrated our idyllic bubble. A dangerous man and his dangerous dog showed up.
I’ll take you inside the story. But don’t expect not to get lost.
The Myth
Prospect Park has its own myths, plenty of them. I’ll tell you about a favorite, “Ghost Dog,” which is a giant beautiful bull mastiff who lived for years in the woods in between the Nethermead and the Peninsula. He’d sometimes come down and play with other dogs but when humans tried to get close, he’d melt away into the woods. We had stories about him, like that he was the beloved dog of an old man who died, or he guarded the drug stash of a local gang. A year or so ago, local animal rescue icon Sean Casey was able to lure the dog into the realm of human companionship.
The dog stabber is another larger-than-life-seeming story that I heard a few months ago. Some deranged guy with an ice pick hauled off out of nowhere and stabbed a Golden Retriever to death. OMG, I texted my dog park friend, Leah. You’ll never believe the story I heard.
Of course, I was terrified and I developed a picture of this guy in my mind, based on the description of the incident, which I heard third or fourth hand, through the powerful dog park grapevine. I imagined all of this happening on the far east side of the park, not my Grand Army Plaza, Long Meadow side.
Weird shit happens at the dog park sometimes. I once saw this investment banker-looking guy tell a woman she was going to rip her dog’s throat out after their two dogs got into a scrap.
For a while, I carried in my mind the invented image of an old and disheveled guy with Coke-bottle glasses, a receding hairline, and pit-stained arms. Maybe he was a retired bus driver with a lifetime of petty grievances, and now he was on the loose, settling scores with flaxen-haired, all-American dogs.
And then I forgot about it.
The Man
I noticed something amiss when I first walked into the park on Friday morning. A fairly large Staffordshire terrier off leash, just inside the inside of the park, was bristling with energy. I could see that he was unaltered, always a dicey proposition in a social gathering of dogs. And when I saw the owner, a young, muscular black man with a small stick attached to his belt, I was like “this doesn’t look good.”
His dog did not a bat an eyelash toward mine, as she and I walked toward Meadowport Arch, which is the tunnel that leads into Long Meadow. Some people are just irresponsible, I thought to myself, which is basically what I think when I see anyone with an unfixed dog. Selfish, foolish, rolling the dice.
I was barely out of sight of the entrance of the park when I heard a dog fight break out. From the voices I knew it was a dog that I knew and liked, and of course, that unfixed Staffy. The other dog’s owner was screaming, “Let him go, let him go,” over and over again.
Once I was out in Long Meadow, I released my dog from her leash to chase a stick and sniff the grass. Before too long, another commotion, another fight. I looked up too late — my dog was running toward the sound. I saw on the periphery the same guy and same unfixed Staffy. He leashed up his dog and pulled it from the melee and continued walking while the other dogs continued fighting.
I shook my head, upset. I leashed my dog, determined to cut a wide swath between us and this whackjob. How dare he? I thought. How stupid can you be?
More than just feeling appalled by the guy’s irresponsible behavior, I felt violated. There is a certain unwritten code of conduct in the dog park. You don’t bring aggressive dogs. I considered calling the police, but something caught me.
What would I say exactly…there’s a thuggish-looking black guy here, with a mean pit bull?
Both things are true, but neither of them is illegal.
I could pick up the phone get this guy hassled. He’s committed no crime but based on all external appearances, I could definitely get the police to come, no problem at all.
I stood there and watched as he disappeared into the distance. I could do that.
The Chorus
Overnight, the community sprang into action. I was forwarded emails from several people, subject line: CLEAR DANGER TO PROSPECT PARK.
When I showed up Saturday morning, a woman stopped me with a flyer just outside the park. Warning—Danger to all in the park. This man carries an icepick and stabs dogs his dog has attacked.
Wait—this is the stabber of Prospect Park? The words that stood out to me in sharp relief on the flyers and the morning dog park discussion: maniac, menace, deranged, psycho.
I was trying to reconcile the words with what I had witnessed. The guy I saw and passed right by didn’t seem disordered or deranged. He was neatly dressed and not displaying any outward signs of florid mental illness. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t mentally ill—but it does mean that the guy was significantly different in presentation than the deranged stabber of my imagination.
There’s no doubt he was out of place. I remember thinking that the guy may be clueless. He might not know how stupid it is to bring a dog like this to the dog park. He may be trying to be macho. He may not want to train his dog or may not know how to approach training. He may have gotten the dog a few months ago.
All of these are types that I have encountered regularly over the years. Some of these qualities described me when I first got a dog. And they would have made him a typical clueless dog owner who will, in time, learn that he needs to be responsible.
The fever was building and the chorus was the loudest voice. Maniac. Menace. Deranged. Psycho. All of them speaking of someone superhuman, larger than life.
But if you had been there, and walked right past the menace unscathed, what would you make of the gathering panic?
The Unknown
They say to “write what you know,” but I’ll tell you what I don’t know anything about: what it’s like to be someone who’s seen as dangerous by default.
When the George Zimmerman trial was going down, I had a tough time filtering it through my personal experience. I would likely be the last person in the world to be “profiled.” Also, people around here rarely carry concealed weapons for self defense reasons. The whole story to me was remote, something that happened in a far more racist and emotionally-charged landscape than my own far more progressive and even-keeled enclave.
Of course my rather sheltered reality comes with its own set of assumptions. I assume that the black people I know, who travel in the exact same circles as I do, are, in general, safer from a random racist attack from a trigger-happy cracker. I also assume that people in my cohort are less likely to make blatantly racist assumptions about black people. Probably in general these things are true, but they conveniently overlook the exceptions, those who break inviolable rules.
The maniac in Prospect Park.
The guy who decided to come through here and trample all over our sense of safety.
Because it’s not problematic at all to circulate a bunch of flyers and to warn people to look out for the black guy.
If that black guy actually is a maniac psychopath.
If we have it on good authority, if we got an email or saw something on Facebook from someone who knows the guy who’s dog was stabbed, we can keep an eye out.
There’s nothing odd about that.
The Code
I said before there is a code at the dog park. There are no fences. We are a self-policing community.
When I first brought my dog to the dog park and was worried about letting her off leash, a more seasoned owner told me: “don’t worry about it. We’ll look out for you.”
The dog park has its kooky characters, surely. The loquacious old drunk guy with his good-natured gun dog. The lady with the pit bull who occasionally goes off on rants.
But it’s rare that someone wanders into our little world that neatly embodies so many potent specters of danger.
First of all, the dog. There are people who will always believe, no matter how much evidence you provide to the contrary, that certain breeds of dogs are unpredictable killing machines.
There are normal dog breeds and there is the “other,” the monster breeds, the fighting breeds, like the pit. These dogs can go off at any second and have superhuman strength.
This guy’s big, unfixed Staffy touched all of those fears.
Then there was the guy himself. Not an argyle sweater-wearing guy. Not a kindly, professor of comparative economics-type of guy. Just in every way not getting the vibe of the dog park.
Over the weekend, I tried to unravel what was observable fact, what was assumption, and what was rumor. The mythology is so big that nothing in life fits together as neatly as it does in the story.
What I saw—a man pulling his dog away from a fight — didn’t square with the description of a guy who instigates fights and then stabs the other party’s dog.
But had I not been near this guy, would I have been as afraid, as a part of the mythology, as everyone else?
I think I might have.
Also, if his dog put his jaws around my dog, I am very sure I would have seen things differently.
All I have is the view from where I was standing.
Caught
In the park today I saw three police cars. Someone had gotten a visual on the perp, called 911. By afternoon, Facebook was alight with the news. “They got him,” said Gothamist. Comments flooded in: “he’s in jail, where he belongs.” “Probably a dog fighter.”
To the commenters at least, perception is everything and what sounds like a bloodthirsty maniac must be a bloodthirsty maniac.
In the park today, I found I wasn’t the only one interested in talking about the underpinnings of the park’s panicked convulsions over the past couple of days. It’s not an easy idea to entertain, the way fear can filter our every perception, and what we see through it, a menace who potentially lurks in every corner of our beloved park, coiled, ready to strike.
They got him. The fear will recede. We’ll go back to normal, chatting about raw dog food and yoga.
But if there’s any chance the dog park menace isn’t the deranged attacker he’s been made out to be? If there’s any chance he’s just clueless, or out of his depth or just kind of an asshole? It’s terrible that we’d elect to turn him from man to maniac, just because it’s easy to. Just because no one questions it.
