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The Plain Dealer
March 27, 1996 Wednesday

LEGENDS BORDER ON THE BELIEVABLE

By: Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

Let me tell you a little story.

A woman driving home from the grocery store heard an explosion and felt something wet dripping from the back of her head.

She immediately guessed that she had been wounded in a drive-by shooting, and that the wet stuff was blood.

Somehow, she managed to drive herself to a hospital emergency room. Doctors diagnosed her problem just as quickly as she had, but reached a different conclusion.

The wet stuff was biscuit dough. The explosion was simply a can of biscuits in her grocery bag popping from the heat.

I read that tale in an article by Pat Truly, a syndicated columnist in Fort Worth, Texas, whose work occasionally appears in this paper.

Truly used the anecdote to illustrate how crime has punctured our sense of security and innocence. "What has America come to when ... a woman's first thought upon hearing a loud noise is that she has been the victim of a random shooting?" he wrote.

So he was embarrassed to later learn he had fallen for that seductive mix of truth and absurdity known as an urban legend.

The story had traveled far and wide. Truly got it from his wife. She heard it from a co-worker, who got it from a friend. Eventually, Truly traced the tale to a woman in Hattiesburg, Miss.

But he shouldn't feel too bad. Lots of folks have fallen for a tale making the rounds in northeast Ohio.

It involves gang wannabes from Detroit who supposedly are looking for a blond, blue-eyed woman shopping at a local mall. Once they find her, they will kill her to earn their way into the gang.

The story has traveled around the region in recent weeks via fax machines and the Internet.

One version said the gang was supposed to strike at Great Lakes Mall in Mentor. Another claimed the target was Belden Village Mall. Yet another version put the initiation at Southern Park Mall in Mahoning County. A fourth version named Eastwood Mall in Trumbull County.

Everywhere the unsigned fax has appeared, police have taken the warning seriously. They've beefed up patrols, but nothing has happened.

Still, the story spreads.

It's absurd. And we would laugh it off, if it weren't for Mary Jo Pesho.

Pesho was shopping with her children at Parmatown Mall in January when she was abducted and murdered. Her body was found inside her van, abandoned in Cleveland. Police have no leads, no suspects, nothing to explain why a trip to a shopping mall could become so deadly.

That's the tragic comfort of a story such as the one about the gang initiation and the mall. It seems to provide an explanation, no matter how ludicrous, for another irrational crime.

"As with many folk stereotypes, accompanying the exaggeration is this seed of plausibility, just enough to make things believable," said Phyllis Gorfain, an English professor and folklorist at Oberlin College.

That grain of truth comes from the news reported daily, a litany of senseless deaths.

We think about a child murdered in Los Angeles when her family drove down the wrong street.

We think about Vincent Drost, killed for a dollar while using a pay telephone in Lakewood.

We remember Abdul Hakim Chui, a promising student shot for his jacket as he came home from a baby-sitting job.

We think about Meghan Norman, killed by her boyfriend while her mother slept upstairs.

We think about Gordon Hill, shot while he sat in his parked car.

We think about murders that should not have happened. But they did. And slowly, we come to believe that someone could be shot driving home from the grocery store. Or at a telephone booth. Or in their bedroom.

Or at a mall.

Just because.

(cite provided by snopes)