I was standing at the corner of Lefferts Boulevard and Cuthbert Road in Kew Gardens one early Saturday afternoon in late May 2015. Sara and I had just seen a couple of neighborhood co-ops for sale, and Sara was looking at the shops on Lefferts while I leaned against the wall of Homestead Gourmet Shop and played with my phone. Two women, a middle-aged mother and her teenage daughter stopped near me and began speaking. I glanced at them, and then went back to my phone. Only when they continued talking — at a moderate level and in a reserved fashion — did I realize that the two were talking to me. I glanced up, and noticed that the mother was wearing a sheitel, a traditional Orthodox Jewish woman’s head covering, and I pegged the two as religious Jews.

“Real genius, Rosenblatt,” I thought to myself.

“There’s a man down the block,” the mother said, quietly, and with little emotion, “and he fell to the ground.” The teenage daughter pointed, and halfway down Cuthbert I saw a lump on the ground, and a man nearby on his cell phone.

“Do you want me to call 911?” I asked the pair, and the Mom answered, “Please, we can’t … because it’s … well … ” just as Sara walked over to see what was going on.

In my mind, I finished the sentence, “ … Shabbat.”

Sara, who’s had more experience than me with such emergencies, started to walk down Cuthbert as soon as I explained what I thought was going on, and I immediately followed her. In about twenty seconds, we were at the scene: an adult male, I’d say in his late forties, black hair, a little greasy, on the ground wearing cut-off jean shorts, legs splayed, breathing, but breathing slowly, apparently unconscious, with another man standing nearby calling someone on his cell phone. When I heard cell phone guy trying to get in touch with what I later discovered to be the injured man’s nearby neighbor, I interrupted, and asked, “Did you call 911?” He nodded YES, and while I listened, I noticed a woman about twenty-five feet away starting to get out of car’s passenger side door, and I guessed that the woman was the wife of Mr. Call-911-cell-phone-guy.

While I tried to figure out whether cell phone guy’s nod actually meant he called 911, I pulled out my phone, and then noticed that his call to a neighbor had dropped. He explained to me that, yes, he did call 911, that the guy on the ground was a neighborhood local, frequently drunk, and that a cab had dropped him and another drunken friend nearby, and that there was a fight of sorts, and that one of the two guys either fell or was knocked down to the ground, while the other guy hopped back in the cab and had the cab driver drive away.

Sara was on one knee trying to talk to the guy on the ground — to see if he could respond — when I spotted a bit of drool on the guy’s mouth. Sara looked at me and said that the guy was alive, and that she smelled alcohol, but as she was talking, we began to notice a pool of blood building behind the guy’s head. I also heard the whoop sound of a fire truck heading in our direction. Sara turned to me and said, “Look at the blood,” and I pointed out to cell phone guy the same thing.

Cell phone guy’s wife came over and explained to me that the guy who hopped back into the cab, before doing so, threatened her and cell phone guy (she referred to him as her husband) with something along the lines of “If you report this, I’m coming after you, and I know where you live, and I know who your children are.” While I listened, I noticed that the cell phone guy’s wife was describing the events dryly to me, which I initially determined to be a brave reaction, and made a note to myself to act the same way in an emergency. But then she asked me in a very emotional tone, “What should I do?” I told her, without thinking, “Report this incident to the police, now!” But I had trouble reconciling what first appeared to be dry reporting by the woman with what quickly appeared to me to be real fear.

“What other choice did she have but to report this?” I thought.

But then, cell phone guy’s wife matter-of-fact tone broke completely, and she almost started to cry. “But he’ll come after me,” she pleaded. To which I responded, “Not if the police get him first, and besides, what’s your other choice? To do nothing? You or your husband gotta report this!”

A fire truck came down the street, Sara backed away from the guy on the ground, and soon thereafter an ambulance arrived. Two EMTs took control, and I motioned for the woman to go over to her husband, and then repeated, “You’ve got to report this incident. For your own safety.”

I then nodded a we’re-outta-here gesture to cell phone guy, and walked over to Sara, and explained my interaction with the woman I just spoke to. Sara motioned that we head back up to Lefferts Boulevard, and we did. Sara and I briefly discussed how each of us saw the incident, and then headed back to our car, which was a couple of blocks away on Austin Street. But I couldn’t get the scene out of my head.

What struck me most about this entire event was that the woman who asked me what she should do would turn to a complete stranger — me — to develop a course of action. From my brief interaction with her husband, he seemed to be sufficiently level-headed to call 911, report the incident to a neighbor of the injured guy, and 100% capable of reporting the event to the police — in order to protect his wife and himself. “So why,” I thought to myself, and then asked Sara, “did she turn to a complete stranger to ask for guidance?’

I’ve got no answer.

Later on, I thought to myself whether what I told the woman was what I actually would do. “What’s your other choice?” still rang in my ears, and still sounded as good then as it did earlier.