A concealed carrier on Reddit said he had just finished dinner and was taking his dog out for a quick walk in the park across from his building when the whole night turned strange almost immediately. In the post, he explained that the sun was still up, he was only planning to be out for a short trip, and because he did not feel like changing out of basketball shorts, he grabbed a small Kahr .380 and carried it in a holster at about 3 o’clock. When he got into the park, he noticed a man in the middle of it who looked like he was clearly out of his mind on something. He figured the easiest move was to skirt around the outside and head through the neighborhood instead.
That plan fell apart the second the man noticed him. According to the post, there was no one else around, so once the guy locked onto him, all of his attention shifted in that direction. The poster said the man was about 35 yards away when he got on all fours and started crawling toward him while barking like a dog. His own dog, a shepherd-rottweiler mix, started growling and looking back over his shoulder as they kept moving away. But the man did not stop. The Reddit user said he kept crawling after them for about a block.
At that point, the poster tried to talk his way out of it. He said he turned and told the man he was just trying to walk his dog and asked if they could both go back to what they had been doing and have a good rest of the night. Instead of calming things down, that made the situation worse. According to the story, the man stood up and started screaming curses at him, yelling that he should murder him. The carrier said he kept facing the man while backing up, but because he was retreating backward and the other man was walking forward normally, the gap kept shrinking. By his estimate, the man got to within about 15 yards.
He thought about running, but said two things stopped him. First, the guy seemed locked in enough that he thought he would probably chase. Second, his dog was keyed in on the threat, and he was not sure the dog would immediately turn and run with him if he took off. So he stopped one more time and firmly told the man to stop following them. That was when the knife came out. The Reddit poster wrote that the man reached into his waistband and pulled a knife, and as soon as he saw the movement he drew his gun with the hand that was not holding the leash. He also took a few steps to his right so the man would be positioned against the hill behind him instead of in line with the apartments.
What followed, he said, felt much longer than it probably was. The two of them stood there staring at each other for a few seconds while the man held the knife and the carrier held the gun. The Reddit poster said he is still not completely sure why he did not shoot immediately, but decided in the moment that if the man took one more step forward with the knife, he would fire. Instead, after that tense pause, the carrier slowly kept backing away and the man did not continue following. Once he finally had enough distance, he turned a corner, reholstered, and sprinted until he was far enough away to stop and call the police.
He later learned that people in the surrounding apartments had seen the whole thing and had already called 911 too. Even so, he said the police did not arrive for about an hour, and by then the man had wandered off and was never caught. So the whole encounter ended the way a lot of these stories do: fast, ugly, and over before law enforcement ever got there. One minute he was just walking his dog in the daylight in a park across the street from home. A few minutes later he was backing away from a screaming man with a knife and a gun in his hand. What would have gone through your mind if that man had taken one more step?
