Some crimes mark a city indelibly, change the feel and the thought of it and in a way that is lasting.
There is one like that for me, I told a colleague in so many words Friday, and before I could even get it out of my mouth he beat me to it.
It's 14 years and about a thousand murders ago that Christine Schweiger stopped for chicken in the 2900 block of W.
Capitol Drive in Milwaukee.
She was returning to her car when a 16-year-old boy with a shotgun forced her to her knees. Down on the ground with her arms outstretched, insisting she had no money, she was shot in the back of the head as her 10-year-old daughter watched.
Perhaps because I once lived not all that far from there and could easily see myself as her, I have never been able to get that out of my mind. Scott Huggins, I know, will be another.
It's not that we are like him.
It's that we'd like to be. He was a big guy, and a tough one, a boxing coach, no less. Surely, if anybody could handle things at a Citgo along a busy street in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, it was he.
"You're pumping gas in the middle of broad daylight . . .
.," said 65-year-old Chuck Montgomery, walking his dog down Huggins' street in the Town of Genesee in Waukesha County on Friday, and shaking his head.
Montgomery once lived in Milwaukee but moved out in the 1970s after somebody got beat up with a chain one night right next to his house.
But that was at night.
Just a month ago, not far from where he used to live, an 18-year-old woman and the baby inside her were gunned down at noon on a Thursday.
Two weeks ago, a woman living near Oakland and North went out on her porch to check the mail, was forced back inside and sexually assaulted at the same time of day.
They like to talk about regionalism and a metropolitan economy in the fancy boardrooms in Milwaukee. When a kid puts a bullet into a hard-working 44-year-old man at Sherman and Capitol at 3 p.m.
on a Wednesday, he also puts a bullet into all that.
You want to say what we always say, that these things are statistical anomalies, but they sure don't feel that way. You used to laugh at Ald.
Bob Donovan when he would call for the National Guard. Hey, we either get more cops or soldiers, or we get more morticians.
To say that what happened will change Scott Huggins' family and his neighborhood is a profound and heart-rending given.
But that's not all that this sort of thing changes.
It changes, said Michele Varick, another neighbor, "how you even think of the city of Milwaukee."
She's the daughter of a cop.
She used to live on the east side. She's like a lot of us. She lives in the burbs now but has a lot of ties, and memories.
And, now, reservations.
"It would not stop me from going downtown," she said. "I will not go to the north side, that's for sure.
"
I know the people who suffer most frequently from crime are the innocent ones who have to live there with it every day. That, too, goes without saying. But the neighborhoods with blood mixed in among the gas spills will never get better without viable businesses that can sell to suburbanites like Scott Huggins, without jobs and education and order that has gravitated elsewhere - and will now, more than ever you fear, refuse to come back.
There will be a lot of tears for Scott Huggins in the next few days.
There should be some for Milwaukee, as well.
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