B.J. Webb is 82, retired and in no way one of those "Hey-Kid-Get-Off-My-Grass" fuddy-duddies.
Over the years, he has learned to expect a certain amount of racket on New Year's Eve.
Noisemakers, firecrackers, howling — by midnight revelers and neighborhood dogs — typically don't knock his nose out of joint. He and his wife raised two sons, after all.
But a mysterious bang that disturbed his slumber early New Year's Day was enough to rouse him.
"It was a loud bang and sounded like some kind of fireworks," Webb said. "I ran over to my (window), but I didn't see anything."
He couldn't have, at least not right away.
Mystery solved
Webb didn't realize what had happened for a few days. He looked around on New Year's Day but didn't see anything amiss at his home off Peters Creek Parkway in southern Winston-Salem. It was wet out, and the misty, half-frozen dew on the top of his 2007 Chevy Impala obscured any obvious nicks to its paint.
Same thing on Monday. He shrugged and put the ruckus out of his mind. Tuesday morning, though, it was dry.
"On the 3rd, I ran my shade up and looked out the window," Webb said, "and I thought 'What in the world is that on top of my car?' "
Near the rear window on the driver's side, there it was — a circular indentation. It was obvious what caused it.
A bullet.
Webb grew up in the country, near Nashville, Tenn. He served in the Navy between World War II and the Korean War. He knows a thing or two about guns, knows how to handle them properly and has a healthy respect for them.
"I'm still amazed at how much racket it made hitting the car," he said, running his finger over the hole. "It looks to me like it could have come from a large-caliber pistol."
Try as he might, Webb still hasn't found the bullet. He hasn't decided whether to try to file an insurance claim. He didn't call the police.
"There's not much they can do a couple days later. No telling where that bullet came from anyway."
A buffoon and his gun
He's right about that. In 2010 — last year's stats aren't available just yet — Winston-Salem police received 803 calls about random gunfire.
That doesn't include cases where people (or dwellings) were actually shot at or hit. Those would be assault cases.
Those 803 reports were just for bullets being fired — the relevant charge, if somebody were to be arrested, would be "discharging a firearm in the city."
That's a misdemeanor, and the penalty for a conviction isn't much, a maximum of 20 days in jail for someone with a fairly significant criminal history.
In this case, neither the damage to a 5-year-old Chevy Impala nor the potential penalty for jail time is the main issue. It's the fact that some buffoon thought shooting up in the air to celebrate the new year was a good idea.
The applicable law can be found in a physics book rather than a statute book: What goes up must come down.
"I just can't get over what it would have done to a human being had it hit somebody on the head," Webb said.
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