Fear Gets in the Way of Helping Those in Need

The Boston Herald

This was the headline that ran on Page 1 Nov. 18 'Helping stranger cost him his life.'

You might remember the story. Keith Willwerth, 22, of Melrose died of massive head injuries after stopping to help move a drunken stranger off a sidewalk near Faneuil Hall. The young man was carrying flowers for his girlfriend when he was attacked and beaten by a group of teens.

The message inherent in the story was this: Mind your own business. No one is safe. Nowhere is safe. You need to be constantly on guard - at home, on the streets, in your car - everywhere. If Willwerth had stepped over the stranger instead of stopping to help, he might be alive today.

Last week, we got the other side of the story, the tragic result of minding your own business and being always on guard. A 69-year-old Worcester woman was found dead outside her widowed neighbor's front door. Stella Bilzerian had been at a church function, was dropped off at her house but couldn't get in because her door locks had frozen in the subzero cold. By the time she reached her neighbor's home, Bilzerian was breathless and weak and could only pound on the door and gasp for help. Inside, her neighbor heard the pounding, not as a plea but as a ruse, a setup. Danger was on the other side of her door. It was late and dark. The 66-year-old woman was frightened. She called another neighbor, then the police, then she sat and waited. But it took an hour for the police to arrive, and by then Bilzerian was dead.

Did the neighbor do the right thing?

Yes. She phoned for help. She would have been crazy to have opened her door not knowing who was on the other side. That's the consensus, and it's also the truth. She was alone and vulnerable and had she opened the door and been killed, she would have been deemed a fool.

And yet . . .

And yet there is another truth. There is a story, 'Angels and Other Strangers' written by Katherine Paterson, in which a woman and child run out of gas on a deserted road on Christmas Eve in the middle of a snowstorm. A man appears, taps at the window, a big, black man, with worn gloves and missing teeth. 'Need some help?' he asks through the closed window and locked door. The woman, terrified, ignores him.

But the child unlocks the door and bolts out of the car before the woman can stop him and she screams at the stranger, 'Don't you touch my child!’

'I saw your car and figured you was in trouble,' he said, then offered to walk back down the road to get her some gas. Even when he comes back with the gas and gets her car started, she is afraid of what he will want, of what he is after. Only the child sees that he is not evil. 'He's our Christmas angel,' he declares.

Is it age that makes us stop seeing angels and begin seeing devils everywhere, age, and the newspapers and television telling us the same horror stories night after night? Is it experience or learned expectation?

I pick up a man walking to the train station because he is well-dressed and carrying a briefcase.

I drive by a man in a tattered coat, with no gloves and no boots. He needs the ride more, and yet I don't stop for him. You shouldn't be picking up anyone, my husband says. But I have the feeling he's wrong, and that I'm wrong, too, that the basis of my 'good judgment' is just a mixture of preconception and prejudice. 

Fear kept a 66-year-old woman from opening her door and fear kept the neighbors she phoned from opening their door, too. Fear keeps us all trapped in our small lives, afraid to go out and to reach out to people we don't know.

Is our fear legitimate?

The only unarguable fact is that nothing is as it seems. The ground may seem secure, but then it shakes and topples a city. A situation may look harmless - how dangerous could it be to help someone who has passed out drunk? A knock on a door may sound menacing, but not be anything more than someone you know calling for help in the only way she can.