I don't normally tell work stories...there are enough emergency services and police blogs out there...but please forgive me for sharing this story from today.
I took a 911 call today from a 16 year old young man who had just been swarmed and robbed on the street. A gang of local degenerates demanded his wallet and taken off with it right out front of his school around the lunch hour. As I was getting the police on the way to see him, I was getting further information, descriptions, direction the suspects fled etc. trying to calm him and getting some more of his story.
He explained how a police car had driven past him whilst he was in the process of being robbed. The group surrounding him had already taken his wallet, and the ringleader had already pulled the cash from it. When they saw the police car they reacted by giving him back his property and acting in a friendly chummy manner so as not to arouse suspicions. Once the police car had driven by however, they once again snatched our poor young school boy's wallet. They didn't hang around this time and took off running.
It was about this time that the first officer arrived on scene, I still had the victim on the phone as he pointed in the direction that the gang had run off and offered a few more pieces of information regarding their description. The officer assured my victim that he would be back, but was just going to spin the area quickly to see if he could locate the suspects.
Feeling a little more relaxed now, as the officer drove away, my victim suddenly exclaimed "Oh my god, I still have my money!" In his panic to call police after he had been robbed, he hadn't realized that he still had his money clenched in his hand. When the bandits had hurriedly given him back his wallet and cash as the police drove by they had been already separated. When the gang snatched the wallet a second time, all they got was the empty wallet. A pretty large sum for a teenager to be carrying on a school day - $215 - his registration fee for the school hockey team (oh yes, how well I remember the huge fees from when my own son was playing team sports at school).
You could hear the relief flood into his voice, as he went on to tell me how hard his mother had worked for that money. Suddenly all I could think of was that there was a group of very pissed of gangbangers out there ...who undoubtedly knew by now that the wallet was empty...my police officer was checking the local streets looking for them, and here was my victim standing alone on the street corner waiting for police to come back...a sitting duck. I hoped the gang didn't think to come back for their cash. Needless to say I stayed on the line with him until we got another officer over to him.
Lordy, I would have loved to have seen the look on their faces when they finally opened that wallet and found it empty!!
....and I hope this boy's mother now thinks to write a personal cheque for these kinds of items instead of sending cash.
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2 comments:
The look on their faces would have been a picture :o) heh! And ur right, who on earth sends a kid out carrying that amount of cash! Tsk.
Personally I always sent a cheque to school...unless the sum required was single digits. The risk of my lovable, yet notoriously absentminded, child losing it was an odds on favourite with Ladbrookes.
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