Mar 7, 2016 3 min read

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really happen?

This analogy is apparently what is happening here in Mt. Lebanon.

On Feb. 25, at 11:31 p.m., I was awakened by gunfire coming from the area around the Rec Center/high school. This was loud enough to hear over the fan I run to drown out traffic. I did not call 911 then, but when it happened again at 10:15 p.m. March 1, I called 911, and in seven minutes the police came. They said they would check it out, but the officer who came to my door told me that the sharpshooters are using silencers, so it couldn’t be them.

The next day I followed up with an email to the police chief, township manager and the commissioners. Eight hours later, Chief Lauth replied that “no one else reported hearing sounds like gunshots at the times I heard them.” And he echoed what the officer said, that the hunters (if you would call them that) were using silencers. No one else replied to my follow-up email.

Well, at 7:45 p.m. March 3, I heard more gunshots – like 10-20 rapid-fire shots. This time, I heard it over the volume of my TV. I went out on my porch and heard more – coming from the same area as the first time. So I called 911. I told them the police did not have to come to my house, that they could just call me. Well, an hour went by and no one had called me back, so I called 911 again to request a call back. The officer who called me back said “they investigated and found nothing” (which is odd, because I didn’t specify to 911 where the shots were coming from, so how could they investigate it?) and that “no one else heard anything” and perhaps it was a transformer blowing or the manhole cover banging as people drove over it. At 10:45 p.m., I heard more gunshots, but I did not call 911, knowing that nothing would be done.

It is insulting and incredibly frustrating to call the police and be dismissed like I am really not hearing what I just heard. I grew up in a rural area, with game lands on the next hill over, so I know what gunfire sounds like.

So my question is, just who do you call when you cannot call the police? This is like living in the backwoods of Southern Georgia where anything goes.

All one has to do is look at the many “for sale” signs in Mt. Lebanon. People are fed up. Lets be clear, this has nothing to do with reducing deer/auto collisions. It is homeowners going to the township, enlisting people to come onto their property to kill deer. As one fellow community member termed it, it is another type of “affluenza” – buying whatever one wants – in this case, no deer.

It is a nightmare.

Jan Seybold

Mt. Lebanon