Chaos Theory

It started about 2:15 a.m. Sunday when officers responded to a report of an injured bicyclist at Foothill Boulevard and 55th Avenue. When they arrived, they found a twenty-year-old Oakland man lying unconscious on the street. A witness told police that a Pontiac Grand Am had hit the bicyclist and had taken off northbound on 55th Avenue. Paramedics took the victim to Highland Hospital in Oakland, where he was reported to be in critical condition. A short time later, Alameda County sheriff's deputies told police that a Grand Am had arrived at the hospital and that the driver, a twenty-one-year-old Tracy man, had been shot. Police learned that at 2:15 a.m., the Grand Am had been sideswiped by another car on Foothill and that someone in the car had opened fire, hitting the Grand Am driver. The Grand Am continued on Foothill, hit the bicyclist and kept going.
How about that for some tidy coincidence? How about a little more "co-inky-dink": Most of this fun took place within blocks of where I teach. Today my class was as unruly as it has been in recent memory, along with a few others throughout the school. Had it been last week, I would have blamed the hot weather, but the past few days have been very pleasant. Maybe the sudden shift in barometric pressure caused a surge in unpleasant behavior. Maybe the boy who threw a rock at a girl this afternoon has no causal connection whatsoever between what happened early Sunday morning. But riding my bike home I kept an eye out for a Pontiac Grand Am.