4 — Friday, September 25, 1992 ~ North Shore News

Mugging of boy sullies Tiddlycove streets

Trevor
Lautens :

GARDEN OF BIASES
iT’S HARD to imagine a
mugging in Greater Tid-
diycove.

Think of the headline: ‘*Greater
Tiddlycove Mugging.”*

Sounds like what the learned
folk call an oxymeron, two terms
that are opposites yoked together.
Like ‘‘a thrifty government.”” The
classic example supposedly i is
“army intelligence.”

But there was a mugging recent-
ly in our neighborhood — an area
so quiet that, while it wouldn’t be
accurate to say that everyone
knows each other, certainly any-
one strolling along our roads and
Streets would notice and remember
seeing any other pedestrians while
on a stroll in broad daylight.

And this mugging took place
exactly then — in broad daylight.
Two o'clock on a summer after-
noon. On Wednesday, Aug. 26, to
be precise.

- It makes me angry to think
about it.

I'd treat the perpetrators of
such a crime very harshly if I had
my way. .

-4t’s like burglary. As crime
statistics 80, burglary is supposed ly

-@ pretty minor offence.

I wouldn’t rate it that way.
Anyone. whose home has been
burgled experiences a very great
sense of violation — and of fear.

You aren't likely to sleep peace-
« fully for many nights after your

ptace has been burgled. |

us What is worse is the distinct

_. feeling that the state, which med-
-- dles so expensively in almost
everything, has let you down.

Even if you returned to find the
criminal gone and experienced no
contact or any violence, you will
probably learn, or recall, chat if

' you had confronted the creep and
used.what case law has established
. as-“fexcessive force’’ in laying him

low — not a guaranteed outcome,
of course — you will find that
you, not he, are in the dock.
Palpable nonsense.

But to return to the mugging.

I won’t identify the young boy,
or the precise location, in order to
protect him and his family from
any possible retaliation. They’ve
been upset enough.

The boy is only 13. On the day
in question, he went to Park
Royal where he bought a box of
chocolates and a birthday card for
a friend.

He phoned his mother, who
works part time, from Park Royal
and told her what he had done
and that he was on his way home.

He phoned again a little later.
His mother — a conscientious
mother who, like others, worries
about her child's safety in these
darkening days of rising unrest
and fear — knew at once that
something was wrong.

“P’ve been mugged,”’ he said.

The boy had got off the bus —
broad daylight, remember — and
walked to his house. It’s only two
houses away from the bus stop on
amajor West Vancouver road,

Three creeps approached him.
He thought they were about 17.

He later gave police pretty good
descriptions: they wore baseball
hats.

One such hat had green on the
lower side of the brim. Two wore
jean jackets. All three were
clean-shaven,

Two were browr-haired, one
had longish blond hair. That
could describe a lot of young
people.

They had knives.

They demanded money, these
three heroes, from this doy who is
a pretty standard-sized 13-year-
old — for a friend, they said,.who
“needed an operation.”’

, The boy said he had no money
— except for a dime he'd found
on the bus. They took it.

Then they asked what was in
one of the bags he was carrying.
‘A birthday card, he said.

They demanded it. They took
the card and tore it up.

Then they asked what the other
parcel was. The chocolates. They
took that from him. —

Then they demanded his shoes
— running shoes. He bent over to
take them off,

But at that moment the young

stinkers apparently saw or thought

they saw someone coming. They
ran off.

The boy had the moxy to run
after them. They ran quite a
distance up the stéepish street,
which ends in a cul-de-sac, and

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then down some public steps
where they disappeared from the
boy’s sight.

When the boy phoned his
mother to tell her, she was so
upset that she told him to wait
while she called a taxi to bring
him to her workplace.

In retrospect, she realizes she
should have called 911 immediate-
ly.

Only later, when the police ar-
rived, did the boy discover three
very superficial knife cuts on his
arm.

In his confusion he had no re-
collection of how he got them.

His mother — and perhaps his
father too? — slept badly for
weeks afterward.

As crimes go, of course, this is
smalf potatoes.

But somehow the sheer
untikeliness of this happening on a
summer afternoon in a peaceful
(and, certainly, relatively weaithy)
neighborhood gives a particularly
ominous edge to it.

It’s appalling that in a society
where really violent and casual -
crime once was uncommon, we've
experienced such horrible acts as
the stabbing death of a taxi driver
for pizza money, and the slaying
— by a burglar (how much force
would have been deemed ‘‘ex-
cessive’ to stop him?) in Calgary
of former North Vancouver resi-
dent Dr. Geoffrey Cragg — dead
at 45 and leaving four children.

Dr. Cragg — an old schoolmate
of my wife, incidentally — work-

ed for years at Lions Gate Hospi-
tal and had planned to return to
this area after his studies ia
Calgary.

What a terrible crime, and what
an awful loss not just to his fami-
ly, who will always be haunted by
it, but to the community as well.

By such measures, the mugging
of a 13-year-old boy is hardly

more than another statistic. Yet,
as the police told his mother, any
mugging is serious. Certainly is.

Ch, by the way: the boy is
black. His assailants were white.
That adds a dimension of disgust.

I’ve put my patented curse on
those three. And its effects are, I
can assure you, horrific.

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