Another story about “just kids” committing armed robbery and smashing a stolen vehicle into someone’s house.
And none of the crimes (except the armed robbery) were being prosecuted, and the gun crime victim was hesitant to go to court because she didn’t want to put these yutes into the criminal justice system.
What Happens After You Get Robbed in Broad Daylight in Montrose
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2016 AT 6 A.M.
...As I passed the Jeep, I heard a door open. And before I could even finish the thought “how strange,” a man — a boy, rather — grabbed me from behind and put his hand over my mouth.
I tried to scream and it came out muffled. I looked up, and a baby-faced guy was pointing a gun at my face, its barrel staring me in the eye. He said, “Give us your purse,” and I let it go. He saw I had a phone, and the man-boy holding me from behind pried it out of my hand.
They took off and hopped in the car, speeding away.
...Turns out, the teens were suspected of robbing four other people before me that day — I was the last victim. Police said they had jumped some people at Walmart and had stolen that red Jeep from a woman at a car wash who was vacuuming the interior, whose toddler-aged daughter was playing in the backseat at the time the boys approached her with the gun. Her car was now totaled, resting atop the smashed front porch, its front bumper falling into the man-made ditch.
I recovered my laptop from the rubble, along with my charger and also my phone case in the car’s front seat. But the rest, including the actual phone, was nowhere to be found. Distracted at the scene, however, by jokes made by the policemen and by my own thankfulness that I was, well, alive, I didn’t care to think about what I had lost. It wasn’t until I got home that night that I even realized my legs were shaking, and it wasn’t until I woke up with the song “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” by the Beastie Boys stuck in my head that I thought perhaps it might take my psyche longer to recover than I would like to believe....
Prosecutors started contacting me in early September, wondering how I was feeling, needing me to write a victim-impact statement, asking me whether I preferred the two juveniles be certified to stand trial as adults for the aggravated robbery charges. I said I did not prefer it, hoping they would outgrow their rather reckless and violent moneymaking scheme soon and would perhaps consider getting jobs at restaurants or grocery stores or something normal like that.
Soon, however, prosecutors informed me that charges against two of the robbers — including the 19-year-old, who faces five to 99 years or life — might be dropped altogether, because I could not ID them. There had been some confusion: Despite my insistence to the police that I saw only one of their faces, for some reason, one officer wrote that I had positively identified all of them. Prosecutors later discovered another report that accurately reflected what I said, and they started to develop a few doubts about convicting two of the robbers without my being certain of their identities — something I could appreciate as a criminal justice reporter all too familiar with faulty eyewitness ID. Yet, again for some odd reason, charges were not filed in the cases of the four other people robbed that day, apparently leaving the fate of the cases on my shoulders alone.
I let it serve as a reminder that, despite my positive experience with the police — an experience I understand has not been the same for all other people — there are still an untold number of kinks in the criminal justice system left to be smoothed out. It has been strange to be on the other side of the table, as a journalist used to writing so often about crimes against strangers — then suddenly finding my own name listed in the court records I so routinely read for others: the accused did then and there INTENTIONALLY AND KNOWINGLY PLACE MEAGAN FLYNN IN FEAR OF IMMINENT BODILY INJURY AND DEATH. The sentence about startled me out of my office chair....
...Two days after the robbery, I returned to my car to find that some heartless robot meter maid had stuck a parking ticket on my windshield while I was, yes, at the police station. I had even left a note: “Was robbed. No money. At HPD picking up police report. Plz don’t ticket.”
Just my luck.
I apologise in that you may have
misunderstood what I was trying to
convey.
I was trying to make the point, that
regardless of what these misguided
miscreants did, the courts will still
view them as juveniles. They will
in all likelihood, receive the ol’
slap on the wrist, and be set free.
The owners over-reacted. They
should not have fired their weapon(s)
at the car, unless they truly felt
their life was in jeopardy. (did the
youths threaten bodily harm with the car,
did they fire a weapon at the owners?)
The judge will look at this as the owners
had the means to notify the authorities
as to the whereabouts of their property,
and that the owners excessive force was
unwarranted.
Personally, I hope the judge puts these
punks in prison, and the owners absolved
of all charges.