Oh how language changes everything.

I was on the escalator heading to the second floor of the local “big box store” when an elderly lady speaking a strange language was suddenly in a panic.  She pointed after an individual who was in a jog running away from her on the second floor.  She pointed, yelled frantically and seemed to desperately need help.  The man on the move had a computer bag in his right hand; he had obviously stolen her bag.  I pointed at the man and asked the woman if that was her bag.  I didn’t understand her words, but her voice and tone were unmistakably clear – get that man!

My wife also saw everything unfold and confirmed my suspicions that I had to do something, so I took off after the man.  He had turned a corner, and I wondered if he headed for the third floor or had split out onto the second floor of the parking garage.  I suspected his car was out there, so I ran out the door and sure enough saw the man running with the bag towards two cars on the far side of the parking lot.

I yelled to a worker who stood in the doorway.

“That man took a woman’s bag!”

He stayed firmly planted in his spot nursing his suspicions that foreigners are indeed strange.

I ran after the man who had now passed all the cars.  I couldn’t figure his next move until he went over to the end of the parking garage and began peering down over the edge.  Of course, I thought; his accomplice is down below to receive the bag.  Clever.

He lifted the bag up to the edge of the railing and continued looking over.  But he did nothing.  Suddenly, he turned around and started walking back towards me.  There would be a confrontation.

“Hey,” I yelled.  “That’s that woman’s bag.”  I had no idea where that woman was at the moment.

He didn’t respond and kept walking towards me.  He was in his fifties, greying with a much smaller build than myself, which I must admit I was happy about.

I grabbed the handle of the bag which he continued to hold on to.

“This bag belongs to that woman.”

He had a blank look on his face.  He didn’t fight the accusation, but he didn’t run away as a frightened criminal.  I started dragging him back towards the store with each of us holding the bag by its handle.

“This bag belongs to that woman,” I kept repeating.

I must admit that I had an unsettling feeling of the unknown at that moment.  Would he have a knife?  Would he try to fight me?  Why wasn’t he running away?   As I held the bag with my right hand, my left hand kept flinching upwards in order to thwart a blunt blow to the face which I anticipated that he would try.

At that time, my wife and son had my back and arrived as reinforcements in the barren parking lot while the worker continue to stand in the door a hundred feet away.

“This is my bag,” said the man finally breaking his silence.

“This is not your bag,” I said. “This belongs to that woman.”

“My mother.  She my mother.”

What a terrible liar I thought.

“She’s not your mother.  Why are you running away from your mother?  Why are you trying to throw the bag off the edge?”

No response as I continued to drag him back into the building. The worker told us that security is on the top floor and so we began the trip up – criminal in toe.

As we reached the top, the elderly woman was just starting her descent.  When she saw us and the man, she was relieved.  Her face lit up, and she started thanking and thanking me.  I took him over to security as my wife waited for her to ride back up so she could escort her over to retrieve her bag.

As all the actors were now in place, several security guards, myself, the thief, and the woman, the man said again that the bag was his and that he had his passport inside.

He opened the bag and pulled out a Japanese passport.  Sure enough, it was his.

The elderly woman walked up to the scene in an extremely unemotional manner not interacting at all with the man, but she made no overtures for the bag either.  In fact she did nothing.  She stood there like a contented child who is oblivious to family chaos all around him.

The security guard and I exchanged some talk about the scenario which was suddenly becoming something far different than I had interpreted.

The man repeated the claim that the elderly woman was his mother, and surprisingly, the woman seemed to confirm that fact.

What was going on?  No one around could speak Japanese, and the mother and son had no words in English to explain the issue at hand.  I began to realize that it wasn’t about the bag after all.

The man knelt over his bag.  He prostrated himself to the floor with tears in his eyes and began to cry vigorously.  The mother stood there expressionless and completely removed from her son’s emotions.  She had expressed her thanks to me many times, but now she stood there with no emotion as her son cried on the floor. What was she thankful for?

Why was the fifty something year old son running away from his mother?  Why did he run to the edge of the building and look over?

The clear-cut robbery had become a mystery locked behind the language barrier.

The security guard said that he would have someone follow them around for a while to make sure everything is okay.  We eventually left the scene and the mother and son moved to a bench near the customer service counter.  She sat unemotional just quietly looking around.  The son sat next to her with his head down crying.

About thirty minutes later when we finished our shopping, we noticed that they had not moved.  He continued his crying with his head down between his knees.

But why?  Did they have a fight?  Was he mentally unstable?  Was he suicidal?  The possible scenarios poured through my mind, but I had no means of straining out the fact from the fiction.

We often here stories of people who do not get involved in something happening around them.  I just reacted in a manner that I felt was the right thing to do.  It was based purely on circumstantial evidence.  A man running with a bag away from an elderly woman who was frantically pointing at him.  Clear-cut case.  Or so I thought.

Did I do the right thing?

I guess I’ll never know.