Blossom Hill Saturday felt strange, foreboding. I spent considerable time there as a teenager - I mostly grew up in Manheim Township, the guy who played drums in my band in high school (coincidentally, the guy who again is playing drums in my current band) lived in Blossom Hill and still does.
It was always a confusing neighborhood to get around in. The corkscrew roads, the hills, could get you lost really quickly. Being there this weekend - stopping by 85 Peach Lane to see what was happening - made me realize how completely overgrown parts of the neighborhood are. Particularly as you drive up Peach Lane, coming from Lititz Pike, there are areas, undeveloped lots, absolutely choked with brush.
And I thought of David Ludwig. You remember, maybe, how he and his buddies used to go on “night patrols” - where they’d dress in black, grab one of the many guns stashed by Ludwig’s father in a basement bunker, then go “patrolling” the neighborhood, making plans to enter homes by force, maybe confront the people inside, maybe kill them.
A neighborhood like Blossom Hill would be a perfect place for that. Not only are there plenty of places to hide, but like most neighborhoods, a good portion of people in Blossom Hill haven’t been in the habit of turning on the outside lights. Others - unfortunately, like the Haines family - apparently leave doors unlocked.
Young David Ludwig would have reveled in that, don’t you think? No need to force your way in when the door’s open. No need to sneak when you can walk right up. When it’s dark enough, when there’s enough cover - you’ve got nothing to fear.
Actually, this is an express focus of the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition, the city-based group that’s trying to lower crime by both installing cameras and teaching property owners about “crime prevention through environmental design.” Throughout the city, high hedges and dark streets are enabling crime, the coalition says. The reality is, the same thing holds true in our leafy suburbs.
And I would like to think that, after the Haines murders, people in the suburbs would take the cops’ warning to heart and begin to keep doors locked, keep the outside lights on overnight. But in my own neighborhood, an older development reminiscent in some ways of Blossom Hill, this hasn’t really been the case. One neighbor burns no lights, though I know they’re home. And I can’t understand it.
Maybe it’s this attitude that - hey, this is Lancaster County, nothing bad is going to happen here. And maybe it’s our “frugality” - or cheapness, in not wanting to spend the money to keep the lights burning.
But that there are kids like David Ludwig out there, like the person who killed the Haines family, needs to trump this uber-trusting, small-town attitude. We are part of the broader world, the pathologies that exist out there exist here. I was almost amused to read the story about how medical malpractice lawsuits are soaring here, James Saxton of the law firm Stevens & Lee told the New Era that “I hope that the culture in Lancaster County is not changing.”
That’s the attitude: Lancaster is different, these things - be they lawsuits, be they high-profile murders - just don’t happen here. But they do.
And I’ve begun to think that attitude is in fact a major reason why.
