A 16-year-old named Eric LaBoy said goodbye to his mother and stepped out into the warm morning. It was last September; it was a short walk to the subway that took him to the Beacon School in Manhattan, but it was still new to him. They had moved to the apartment on Taylor Avenue in the Van Nest neighborhood in the Bronx just a couple of weeks earlier.
He spotted the two older boys as he approached their corner. If they said anything to him, he did not hear. He was listening to his iPod. He turned onto Morris Park Avenue. The boys followed.
They walked like this for about another block until the boys stopped him. The older of the two, 18, asked him if he lived around there. Then he pushed Eric into a metal gate. The second boy, 17, stood close by. Eric was cornered.
The older boy explained what was going to happen, Eric said. He was going to take Eric’s things, “and if I do anything about it, we were going to fight,†Eric recalled.
Eric, three months earlier, had been named Police Commissioner for a Day at nearby Transit District 12 after writing a winning essay about people getting robbed. He was a member of the Police Department’s Law Enforcement Explorers program for teenagers. But none of that mattered much with his back against the fence. The older boy took the iPod and his wallet, removing $15. He handed the wallet back.
“He had the nerve to shake my hand before we parted ways,†Eric said.
When the robbers were out of sight, Eric ducked into the Transit District 12 building and reported the crime. Officers put him in a police car and they drove around. Eric spotted the boys, but they spotted the police car, too, and the older boy ran away. The police picked up the younger suspect, but as he had played little part in the robbery, officers chose not to charge him, waiting instead to catch the older suspect.
It turned out they were brothers, with enough of a history in the precinct that even the commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Kevin Nicholson, knew them.
His memories of interactions with the boys sounded more like Mayberry than Morris Park Avenue.
“I had arrested them personally for shooting off a BB gun,†he said. He knew where they lived. The boys’ grandmother answered their door one day soon after to face â€" again â€" the inspector in his white shirt.
“Do you remember me?†he asked. She said yes. Eric, afraid the boys were part of a gang and fearing retaliation, had said he did not want them arrested. The grandmother, fed up with them, shipped them to relatives upstate, in Orange County, Inspector Nicholson said.
This good news was lost on Eric. He does not inflate what happened, and he knows that much worse things happen to people all the time, and that being relieved of cash and electronics is practically a rite of passage in some neighborhoods. But the psychological aftermath of the robbery had a deep impact.
“Mentally, everything was different,†he said. “I’d turn around to check my back every couple of steps. I went from knowing everybody to having a bull’s-eye on my back.â€
He all but stopped walking outdoors alone. He said he would sleep late on purpose, so that his mother had to drive him to the subway. He missed the Explorers classes and church nights. Finally, a supervisor with the Explorers promised to drive him home from class.
“I felt like I was 10 years old all over again, just crossing the street on my own,†he said.
He was more or less snapped out of his funk by a call from Joseph A. Thompson, president of the precinct’s community council. He had been toying with a Safe Haven program in the precinct since the July 2011 disappearance and murder of Leiby Kletzky, an 8-year-old boy abducted in Brooklyn while walking home from school alone for the first time. Businesses can put a Safe Haven sign in a window for children in trouble. Would Eric say a few words at the next meeting?
Eric stood up and told his story while his mother, Yasmin Khan, 35, cried beside him. A supermarket and a Realtor were the first to post signs. Now there are about 95 in the neighborhood.
“This needs to be a village again,†Ms. Khan said.
Eric turned 17 on Saturday. He is soft-spoken, polite, and larger than he was that September day. His confidence is back. He said he wanted to be a police officer.
No comments:
Post a Comment