Boston : No longer feel safe Downtown

[surfroshan]

I’ve been commuting in to the city for the past several years with, like most of you, a hiatus of WFH between 2020 and now, where we’ve been coming back into the office for a few weeks.

I’ll usually take a lunchtime stroll and sometimes pick up a few things from the stores located right in DTX and generally have never had an issue there, day or night.

Yesterday though, was different. I walked out of the Shake Shack in DTX at around 1PM (had to try it once, wasn’t impressed) and was standing on the sidewalk for a brief moment before starting to walk back towards work. In that time, one of the men that seems to hang out in the area (there were about half a dozen in the vicinity) had been something shouting at me, or in my direction, hard to really know…

I had headphones in and was halfway into a podcast so I do what I always do, and just tried to walk away from the situation without acknowledgement.

Here’s where it gets ugly… rather than moving on to the next victim, he starts to follow me, across the street, and is now shouting about how “he had a really bad week” or something to that effect while demanding money.

The ”I’m in danger!” lobe of my brain started to light up like a Rockefeller Christmas tree at this point because I could tell something was really off about this encounter

He then makes an uncomfortably close pass, turns around to block my path, and rolls up the sleeves of his hoodie.

He then yells at me” give me the f***ing money or I’m gonna take it from you.”

I start to back away quickly (still, without saying anything) to the opposite side of the street again - and a flood of obscenities follow about how he’s going to “f***ing kill this bitch” and he still is getting closer and now reaching for something behind him.

At this point I just took off in a full on run down Milk Street and didn’t look back for two blocks.

This is the first time I’ve felt unsafe in Boston and it was in the middle of the day. I was really starting to feel good about coming back in to the office, but this harassment (however significant or insignificant you want to judge it) really ruined the rest of my day and made me feel totally unsafe.

I really don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t run.

You might say I’m “overreacting” and this is “normal city stuff - deal with it!” But in 8 years I’ve never had an encounter like this before.

[tennisluvrredux]

Vadi race enti baa

[surfroshan]

1 minute ago, tennisluvrredux said:

Vadi race enti baa

who? victim's or assailant's??

[tennisluvrredux]

26 minutes ago, surfroshan said:

who? victim's or assailant's??

Assailant and victim both. Victim nuvvu kada 

[surfroshan]

5 minutes ago, tennisluvrredux said:

Assailant and victim both. Victim nuvvu kada 

haha nope reddit thread but i guess victim was most probably white from the writing assailant cud be white/black/asian/latino/hispanic/mixed lol

[tennisluvrredux]

1 minute ago, surfroshan said:

haha nope reddit thread but i guess victim was most probably white from the writing assailant cud be white/black/asian/latino/mixed haha

Which subreddit baa

[surfroshan]

1 minute ago, tennisluvrredux said:

Which subreddit baa

r/boston i believe just paste in google

[andhra_jp]

looks like its 1 year old article