My Near Brush With Death, Thursday Afternoon, June 7,2018, What Family Member, Friend, Will Die Tomorrow? Poem by Dennis Ryan

Thursday night, June 7,2018 at 11: 16 p.m

Death didn't announce its arrival, but its calling card
came loud and clear—a car ran a stop sign at 60+ miles
per hour after I came to a stop at the corner of Farm Gate Road
and Cary Towne Boulevard in Raleigh at 1: 30 p.m today.
If I had pulled ahead just five yards, just an instant earlier
it would have meant instant death. I sat back in my driver's
seat—I felt my being stir in my body. That's how intense
this near miss was. I quickly reflected upon what I had said
this morning in public about the police while under camera
surveillance, including how I had provided others detailed
descriptiona of police undercover tactics as related to the sudden
disappearnce of Centre County District Attorney Ray F. Gricar
in the vicinity of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, about my morning
call to Joseph Edgley Jr., a hometown friend, during which
I described a first brush—in our hometown of Wellsville,
New York in 1971—now a lifetime ago. Lifetimes ago.

My life nearly ended today—I thought how my wife, my sons
would have suffered yet another grievous blow. I dare not tell her, so I tell you instead. Please forgive me. I need tell someone. I dare not stay silent, this being my third brush of late, all involving speeding cars/vehicles—vehicles operated by unknown drivers, the previous one occurring at a truck bay behind Cary Towne Mall; the time before that on the evening of December 4,2009, the day Kevin Stillman Cook was found dead in his Durham, NC apartment by his parents Mike and Gail, our former friends. This was just the first of two sudden deaths in the Cook and Stillman families, both young men, and just how far will the police go to cover up, in undercover ops to shut someone up, to clamp down on the truth for fear of what witnesses, friends, former friends will say? It was Mike and Gail who had betrayed Kim and I ten years earlier at the time our family cars started being destroyed one after the other by unidentified hit-and-run drivers in Durham, NC, and Baton Rouge, LA, while our older son Devin was attending Louisiana State University.

What could I have done differently today? (I don't know—
I don't have many alternatives based on what has happened to me, my family—our situation, our finances made worse day after day.) I went about my day after gathering myself. Life doesn't stop living itself for anyone, no matter how brutal the death, how
heinous the crime, how ingenious the cover-up—police crimes
and cover-ups included, which are far too many, more numerous
than you can imagine: of being, of being numerous. Several people—members of family, friends, et al.—have either died suddenly, early, well before their time, or been seriously injured since the destruction of our family cars began in Durham, NC, in late November 1999, then the ensuring police cover ups. Some of those dead, injured, had kept in touch with me as our cars continued to be destroyed, as the police repeatedly failed to provide us with accident reports at the scene in accident after accident. They were well-acquainted with what was happening.
Now they are dead, or seriously injured. I am alive today.
What family member, or friend in the know will die tomorrow?
I don't know, but you can bet it will happen. It will happen.