CSI: El Pollo Loco

Scene: casual Saturday afternoon, the first day of Spring Break. Three friends mosey on down to El Pollo Loco for lunch. After their tasty meal of grilled, seasoned chicken, they leisurely consider getting up to leave, when there seems to be some type of commotion in the parking lot. People in the restaurant get up out of their seats to look out the window, some people excitedly pull out their cell phones and dial 911. A man is walking around the parking lot gesturing vigorously to the police cars that pull up with their lights flashing. ----the title rolls and the music starts...

Actually, I've rarely watched CSI the original Las Vegas version. (But one year I had a student whose parent was an actual, real-life Las Vegas Police Department Crime Scene Investigator.) So, when we went to lunch on Saturday with my friend who was visiting us on her way back home to spend Spring Break in San Diego, we weren't even thinking of crime. We were thinking of delicious grilled chicken and pinto beans, and horchata.

And we enjoyed our lunch and were just finished eating when all the fuss broke out. We hadn't heard the gunshots; we'd only noticed all the people going to the windows, and then we saw the guy in the parking lot striding back and forth and gesturing to the cop cars that suddenly were filling the parking lot. We said to one another, "Hmmm...what's up? Maybe we ought to leave before they block our truck with another car..." TOOO LAATE....

The officers who'd been looking around the parking lot, talking to the agitated man who'd been striding around out there, were right then encircling, not just CoolGuy's truck with yellow "crime-scene--do not enter" tape, but they'd marked the entire parking lot. Yes, there we were---part of the drama.

I asked the people right behind us if they'd seen what had happened, because I'd heard them calling 911. Apparently, they heard the gunfire, and then they saw a man outside hurrying across the lot with a gun in his hand. They'd been told by the police operator that the situation was known to the cops, because the man they'd seen was a police officer who was responding to a threat and help was on the way. Well, the plot thickens.

A police officer came in and talked to most of us, asking us what anyone had seen. We had heard and seen nothing till everyone had started reacting around us. But that didn't let us off the hook. The detectives arrived, cops were spending a curious amount of time around CoolGuy's truck, and then an officer came in to ask if it was his vehicle. We were the obvious choice to ask, because the truck was parked in the handicapped space, and I was sitting there with my RoboCop boot propped on the scooter.

Soon, there was even more police tape cordoning off the Silverado. Even more attention was focused around the back of the truck. By now, the manager of the restaurant had sent out a worker with hand printed "closed" signs to attach to the doors. People who'd told the police officers that they'd seen nothing were calling friends to come and pick them up, since their cars were still wrapped inside the yellow tape. We went outside because it had gotten a little chilly sitting there in the air conditioned store. There were little groups of people standing around chatting about their versions of what was going down. I started to wheel around and take some more photos. There wasn't a dead body, there wasn't any bleeding people, or blood anywhere on the ground. There began to be little yellow plastic markers with numbers being set out around the back of where we'd parked. Then, the detectives really narrowed in on the truck.

Finally, the officer who'd initially come over to ask if we were the truck owners, came to tell CoolGuy that all the focus was on our truck because there was a bullet hole in our license plate. There wasn't any evidence that fuel was leaking on the ground, but the detectives were going to be spending a lot of time on this vehicle. In other words---lunch was over, but you can't go home. At least not in that truck.

We'd already been there ninety minutes past when our food had been consumed. We'd already been treated to an order of flan and some churros. CoolGuy had gone to order some dessert while we just hung out in the store, but the manager refused his money, and treated us. But, it was waaaaay past time to leave. I had missionaries coming to dinner in a couple of hours. So, I called a neighbor who was happy to come and pick up my friend and I. She loved my reason!! Bullet hole in your truck?? Crime scene tape trapping you in the parking lot?? Only you, my dear EarthSignMama, has such a lot of excitement in her life.

So, we left, CoolGuy hung out for three more hours (!!) and finally got home with the bullet hole. Seems, there is a steel strut right behind where the bullet went through, shattering it into fragments, most of which were in the spare tire, which is mounted under the truck, right behind the steel strut, right behind the license plate. So, the detectives got him to unlock the spare tire so they could lower it and collect all the fragments for their case.

It was rather interesting to hang around and watch it all. He and the guys who were with the off-duty school police officer who'd engaged the original shooters had an interesting time chatting. The three men (one was the officer) were driving home in a truck when they saw a man shoot another guy across the street from the restaurant. Then, the shooter ran across in front of them with his gun out, so these men pulled into the chicken store, and the off-duty police officer jumped out with his gun. He identified himself as a cop, and told the shooter to drop his gun. Instead, the gun was fired at the cop. Then the shooter got in a car that was on another street on a different side of the restaurant, and the cop shot back at the gun-holders in the car. (Later, two wounded young men turned up at a hospital and were arrested.) The detectives needed the bullet from CoolGuy's truck for their case against the wounded arrestees.

So, here's the hole in the license plate. Weird that this is the only injury to the truck---weird and good! Another view:
CoolGuy later called it a blessing that we had not gotten up to leave when we were first finished eating. We'd have walked into the parking lot just as the shooting started. One of us could have that hole in us, instead of the license plate. And none of us need that, I agree.

Credits roll...Special Guest Stars: Silverado, CoolGuy, license plate.