Poverty Explains His Need To Steal

The first I knew of the fact that the car I was travelling in was stolen was when the driver side-swiped another parked car.

His Friends.

Both mirrors shattered into a cloud of glass and plastic and I recall head-butting the other back seat passenger in order to avoid being cut by flying debri coming in the back window.

Perhaps the collision impact caused me to come to my senses that early morning as we sped from one break-and-enter to another. No amount of trauma warrants being locked up for behaviours that simply are wilful and wanton destruction.

I knew the driver and feared his street presence yet, when encountered he demonstrated a healthy respect for my own smarts. What drove him to at the age of 16 acting out so destructively became obvious.

I recall him attending the same Church social group that I attended.

Once.

Perhaps in that three hour activity he detected he was as safe on the street as he would have been in that Church hall. In later years I realised that one visit was enough to have his family home targeted, not by the Police but by the very same institution that marked me for life.

Under the guise of a ‘pastoral care’ visit the Family were conned into accepting ‘charity’.

One day, years later in the backyard of a friend he recounted how the very same young man driving the stolen vehicle had died in strange circumstances. Isolated and out of surveillance camera view he was found hanged from a fence post literally metres out of view from late night public transport commuters.

Forensics reported to his shattered Mother that he had a high dose of barbiturates in his bloodstream. Then there is the point that why would a child turn from a social yet brazen thief into an depressed loner, almost catatonic according to his peers?

Poverty explains his need to steal but nothing explains why he acted out so violently other than a missing positive mature male role model in his life.

His audacity and command of mechanics surely could have been tapped into as a vocation. So, almost three decades later I type this into my computer and visualise how close we came yet how far we went.

Nothing is more destructive that sexual assault as a means to control, defile and destroy others. I liken it to the most horrific of weapons of mass destruction.

Apart from war and killing others, sexual assault underpins the vast majority of ailments in society in my opinion. For others they latch onto their traumatic vice, their bottle, needle, drug or behaviour and lament time lost.

In action, in speaking out against these crimes against humanity that young thief may not have joined his own Brother in the grave.

Both boys died at the hands of monsters who shattered their dreams as mirrors of their souls collided.