In Chelsea, Back to Sleep Suzanne Falter-Barns

（Suzanne Falter-Barns is a novelist and essayist. Her novel, Doin' the Box Step, was published in 1992. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Adweek, and other periodicals. Her essay on a murder on the street outside her apartment in the Chelsea district of Manhattan appeared in the Times on November 25, 1989. ）

On a cool night recently, a woman was murdered in front of my apartment in Chelsea. She was sleeping in her car when someone—evidently trying to steal her car radio—was surprised by her, and slashed her throat with a knife.

The woman killed was only a few years older than I, and her photograph in the papers was familiar. Many neighbors had seen her coming and going from the Buddhist temple next door, and so she was one of us—another daily face you'd pass, unknown but still part of the surroundings. That she slept in her car was not even surprising, just another thing people do in New York. We regard it with the silence with which one sees everything in this city—the silence of blase acceptance.

Here is the core of the tragedy. An upstairs neighbor, wakened by her car horn, watched from his window as the stabbed woman staggered from her car, made her way up the steps of the temple and rattled the doorknob in vain. In the darkness, he could not see her profuse bleeding, but he could hear her speaking strangely, asking for what sounded like her mother. She was drunk, he assumed, or high, and he watched her make her way back to the car and drive away quickly. She died a few moments later.