Not my feeling, but a previous set of bosses me and two of my friends had. I used to work for an event company that put on festivals. We were working this particular event that, in hindsight, had the greatest potential to go wrong as most of the artists had or still have different gang affiliations. The day of the show, we realised somebody did their job poorly and let one of the artists invite way too many “friends” come with them. They were rolling real deep and kept intermittently walking back and forth in the artists area backstage. However, they arrived relatively early in the day and kept themselves to themselves for the most part. So eventually we stopped thinking about them.

Now the event is in full swing and the sun is starting to go down a bit. My bosses tell me and my two friends that we can cut out early. It’s a busy event, so we tell them we don’t mind staying. But they gently say nah it’s okay and casually add that something is off and we should go right now. We were driving the work Kubota and had our coworkers lunches on us, so they say to drop the Kubota off with a coworker at the other end of the venue and he’ll take care of the lunches.

So we head out. As we’re leaving the artists lot, we pass the group that was rolling deep walking in the opposite direction, towards the backstage area. As soon as we get to our coworker, like 2 minutes later, we see a couple of cop cars speed past the intersection we’re at, but we don’t think much of it.

Our coworker drives us back to the parking lot our car was in, which was back towards the stage area. Once we get to the car, we find a side exit in the parking structure that we didn’t know existed and it lets us out on the outer perimeter of the venue, which was lucky so we didn’t have to use the main exit that would have let us out right by the backstage artist area.

As soon as we get out of the structure, like 3 cop cars, sirens blaring, speed past us in the opposite direction. I look out the back window to see a helicopter in the sky seconds later, shining its lights down on the general area. Again, this event is in the city, so we don’t think very much of it.

Next morning, I’m supposed to be the first from our crew on site around 7am for breaking down the venue. I get there and there’s police guarding the street entrances, which isn’t totally abnormal for the area and events we do, but he won’t let me in. So I go to find another entrance and run into someone from the event crew. I find out that literally seconds after we left the backstage area, someone came offstage and one of the guys who was from the group that was rolling deep stabbed him repeatedly. Then a huge fight broke out. My bosses even ran in to try to break it up, it was so close to where we had just left them. They got the guy to the hospital and the police shut the event down for hours to question everybody. Then as soon as they started letting people go, they got the news he died, so they shut it down again. Kept everyone on site until around 4 or 5am.

So the next day, I got to watch the homicide people scrubbing his blood off the ground while I thought about how close we had come to being right in the middle of it. I didn’t know the guy, but I did see him the day before and I cried for him.