Hi Elizabeth,
Well, I have no idea if you are still with me or not. I hope you are, and Happy Late Night in any case. I know - or rather I surmise - that you are working non-stop on your current projects, so I certainly understand that. I won't go into a diatribe about communication problems. All I ask (and all I have ever asked) - and this is only when you have time to respond, so no worry - is that if you are not interested in communicating with me anymore, to please say so. I thought you might be alluding to it in the beautiful cover song you recorded a month or so ago, because of the lyrics of that song. But anyhow, enough of that for the moment.....Just know that I am here if you want me to be. :):)
For the time being, well.......I would just say read at your own risk, because I am gonna discuss aspects of stuff that happened to me, and it will sound crazy. But it's not. Reality can be crazier than any made-up story (or shall we say "truth is stranger than fiction?)......The following is part of a much larger story of something that happened to me in 1989, and tonight I am just gonna deal with some of the unusual aspects of this one incident, and I am gonna make observations about those aspects, as Lt. Colombo would. If you read any of the old Myspace blogs about this subject, it might already be familiar to you, and thus (and hopefully so) the Weirdness will Seem Less Weird.
For me it was Real Life........
I will try to keep it brief :
In September 1989, I was kidnapped by a man named Jared Rappaport. He was - and still is! - a professor at CSUN who teaches film studies. He is also a psychopath.
That September, it might have been around the 2nd of the month, I responded to a knock at the front door of my family's house at 9032 Rathburn Avenue in Northridge. A man was standing on the porch. I am not sure if I knew him at the time, my guess is no. Perhaps I had seen him, but I am pretty sure we'd never spoken before. For historical purposes, I will note that he and his wife moved next door to us in approximately the Fall of 1988, give or take a month or two.
So maybe I'd seen him once or twice, but I sure did not know him when I answered the door that night. Neighbors aren't close anymore, especially in L.A.
On the porch that night, Jared Rappaport used a ruse to get me to come out of my house. I don't remember exactly what he said, but I can remember him standing there, probably introducing himself, and then soon after that I was accompanying him down our walkway, toward the sidewalk.
Maybe he said he was looking for his dog, or something like that. "Have you seen him"?.....
Well, when we got to the corner (we lived at a corner house, and our walkway met the corner sidewalk), that is when Jared Rappaport changed his tune. It was about 10 at night, on a Labor Day weekend, the neighborhood was quiet and no cars or people were passing by.
He then pulled a gun on me, from out of his jacket, and proceeded to stick it in my side. He said what you would expect, that I'd better keep quiet or he would kill me. What he did was to grab my arm and pull me next to him, while we were walking, so that he could stick the gun in my ribs and have me half a step in front of him and slightly to his side, with his free hand still holding my shoulder or upper arm. He was bigger than me, about 6'1", or 6'2", and with an athletic build. I didn't know what to do, so I just kept walking down the sidewalk towards his house, as he instructed. I halfway thought it was a joke, but a deeper part of me knew it wasn't.
His house was about 75 to 100 feet down the sidewalk, and we walked that way, me a half step ahead and just to his side, with him holding my arm and his gun hidden away in my ribcage. It was dark out. Nobody drove by, nobody was outside. It was just me and him. I remember the way he kept looking around, though, to see if anybody was there. But nobody was.
Soon, probably within 20 seconds, we were at his back gate, which opened off of Sunburst St. For reference, my family's house was at the corner of Rathburn and Sunburst, and Rappaport's was next door and behind us at Sunburst and Etiwanda. Google Map it for reference, if need be.
Well anyway, before I knew it, I was taken through the back gate, and then I was inside the house, and then I was Jared Rappaport's prisoner. For real; no joke.
Now, I will not go into my time in his house. That is for another day. No worries on that score either, but suffice to say that Jared Rappaport should be in prison, rather than teaching at CSUN.
What I wanted to get into instead was the unusual aspects of what happened afterward, and because this story - even one incident or even one single aspect of an incident - takes a very long time to cover - I will probably just add a detail or two tonight, and then continue tomorrow or whenever.
I was inside Jared Rappaport's house for about 24 hours, give or take.
As far as I was aware, nobody knew I was in there. Nobody but me had been home at my house when he came to my door.
Now, in my memory, one or two people came to his door while I was in there, to try and persuade him to let me go. And in my memory, a guy I know ( a close friend of my brother) actually came into the house , with Mr. Rappaport himself, as an associate of Mr. Rappaport, and this guy saw me there, in the state that Mr. Rappaport had me situated in, and this friend of my brother then tried to persuade Mr. Rappaport to let me go.
But Mr. Rappaport wasn't having any of it.
So finally what happened was that some guys busted through the door, using flash/bang devices. ///
A whole lot of stuff happened after that, which I will perhaps relate at a future time.
But for now, what I would like to say tonight, is about the nature and response of the crime itself.
You would expect, in a kidnapping or hostage situation, for the police to respond, probably with their Swat Team. Or maybe the FBI would be there too, with their black armor military gear on.
But this response, the one that ended my captivity in Jared Rappaport's house, was undertaken by some guys in jumpsuits. Just a couple of guys, two or three. They used flash/bang, and they were very fast and agile - like lightening - and before I knew it, the whole nightmare was over (that particular nightmare, anyway).
So, because I have to go to bed (got choir in the morning), my question for tonight, which I may or may not have the answer to, is :
Why did the police Swat Team of the FBI not rescue me from Jared Rappaport's house?
That would be the case in almost any hostage situation, would it not? Swat Team and helicopters, or FBI..
But my rescue was done by just a few highly efficient guys.
Special Forces guys. Guys not in uniform, per se, even who have long hair, and who just look like "dudes" so to speak, but who move with lightning speed and precision. Military precision. Guys in jumpsuits with long hair, scary and fast.
So that's question #1 for tonight. Why, when Jared Rappaport kidnapped me, did some guys - certainly military - rescue me instead of LAPD Swat, or local FBI?
We shall take our guesses as the story continues........
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment