As Joni Alexander put it, what happened to her is something she has considered could happen in her neighborhood but being the person robbed has still shocked her and many others in town.
Alexander had a relative in town and the two had gone out, not returning until 5 a.m. She said when she comes home to her house not far off Main Street, she normally looks around for, well, for anyone who isn't supposed to be hanging around her house.
But she wasn't driving and she didn't do a look-around and there was someone there, actually several someones. Before it was over, Alexander had been robbed at gunpoint and her purse stolen, and as the robbers ran away, they shot their weapons many times. Alexander thought they might have been shooting back at her. It appears they were shooting into the air, but she could not have known that at the time.
Even though Alexander is still in a bit of a state of shock by it all -- what with the recurring thought that she could have been killed crossing her mind at every turn -- she took the long view of it all with reporter Eplunus Colvin, who sat down with Alexander for an extended interview and a tour of where it all happened.
Alexander's main point was that, instead of people acting as if things like this don't happen, they should all be looking for ways to limit such occurrences.
"This stuff out here is real and no matter what you do, it doesn't matter if you are not addressing our true issues that are affecting people every single day," Alexander told Colvin. "We got to stop being ashamed of that. The part that we need to be ashamed of is not doing something about it."
She also laid at least some of the blame on many other factors we are all familiar with: a police department that needs more resources, not to mention police officers, landlords that take care of their properties, a failed education system, etc.
Alexander is a City Council member for a while longer, but she didn't run for reelection, and this incident has put an exclamation mark on that decision.
"It makes a lot of things make more sense," Alexander said. "It's going to allow me to move differently with some things that I am going to pursue in the future because I don't ever want to be in the situation like that again because I couldn't imagine how I would feel if I saw a video of my loved one in that situation. It would break my heart."
The incident would be just as shocking had it happened to someone other than a council member, but assailants with the nerve to target a public official -- and we imagine everyone in the neighborhood knows she is one -- suggest that this could happen to anyone. It is a scary proposition, one that, as Alexander said and has said before, Pine Bluff has to fully own if we have any chance of putting a stop to such heinous activity.