At 3:13 in the afternoon on September 5th, 2014, in Chicago, a young woman around the age of twenty five is stabbed in the middle of a busy park. She cries out for help from one of the four people around her, but they stand and stare in shock. She crumples to the ground as her killer walks away unnoticed, and the woman slowly and painfully bleeds to death. The four people stand, unfazed, as the woman bleeds out over the sidewalk, and lets out her last dying breath. This is an account of the week in the lives of the four people leading up to that Friday afternoon. This is an account of the bystander effect.