“Feb. 11, 2018. Chicago. Red shoelace on a fire escape. SWAT raid, wrong house.”
In a cluttered basement archive in Baltimore, a retired librarian has spent 20 years cataloging America’s forgotten crimes. He calls it the “Index of Sinister.” What he found will chill you to the bone. index of sinister
The “Index of Sinister” began as a grief project. In 2003, Pondo’s daughter, a grad student in Flagstaff, was killed in a crosswalk by a hit-and-run driver. The driver was never found. But a week before her death, Pondo found a note his daughter had scribbled in a journal: “The crossing guard wasn’t there today. Felt wrong.” “Feb
Of course, skeptics call Pondo a hoarder of coincidence. “Apophenia with a filing system,” says Dr. Mira Laskey, a cognitive psychologist at Johns Hopkins. “The human brain is wired to see patterns. A red shoelace doesn’t cause a raid any more than a black cat causes a broken mirror.” Red shoelace on a fire escape
