by Nigel Latta
In fact, about the only thing that really bothered me was the constant referral to Michael Choy as ‘the Pizza Man’. Pretty much everybody did it. Now, I can understand at one level that the reason for this was to reduce confusion because there were a lot of names. From this point of view it made sense since everyone knew that Michael was the Pizza Man. Except it just kept grating away at me. It was so impersonal.
I sat in court listening to them talk about him like that, and wondered how I would feel about that if it were my own son. I wondered how it must be for Michael’s family to hear him referred to in that way. He wasn’t ‘the Pizza Man’ to them.
Then I looked over at the defendants, most of them still doodling, and the clinician in me strained at the leash. I didn’t want them to hear Michael Choy referred to in that way. They had depersonalised him when they attacked him, and I didn’t feel comfortable with him still being depersonalised. The clinician in me wanted those young people to be confronted that this was a real person they had killed. I wanted them to hear his name. I wanted them to think about the fact that they hadn’t killed a ‘Pizza Man’, they had killed Michael Choy.
At one point I looked around the courtroom trying to decide who I could raise the matter with, but there wasn’t really anyone. None of the defence lawyers would want to personalise the victim more. I didn’t have any form of contract with the Crown lawyers, and it would have been inappropriate in the extreme for me to raise it with the Judge. Essentially it was none of my business.
Instead I reminded myself that the trial wasn’t concerned with accountability in the way I might be. The clinician in me wanted to sit all those kids down in a quiet room and make them understand what they’d done. Criminal trials aren’t about that, though, criminal trials are about lawyers and legal arguments.
So I sat on my hands, and every time they said ‘the Pizza Man’ I said Michael’s name in my head.
Someone had to.
OUR YOUNGEST KILLER
THAT WAS THE HEADLINE in the Sunday Star-Times on 25 August 2002, just after BJ and his friends were convicted for the attack which led to the death of Michael Choy. Underneath the headline was a half-page picture of BJ himself, looking typically angelic. He looked like a sweet kid. Except of course that he wasn’t; instead he was our youngest killer.
In fact, only two of the six young people were convicted of murder, the 16-year-old boy who had swung the baseball bat and the 17-year-old girl who had been standing beside BJ. The rest of them, including BJ, were convicted of manslaughter. The 14-year-old client of the lawyer who had originally contacted me was acquitted of all charges relating to the attempted aggravated robbery of the KFC driver.
When Justice Fisher pronounced sentence BJ cried.
I didn’t go back to court to hear the verdict or for the sentencing. By the time the jury retired my job was essentially over and so I set about trying to catch up on all the things I’d put off over the six or so weeks of the trial. Besides, I’d had about as much of that particular tragedy as I could take.
For about a week the fallout from the trial took centre stage on the media merry-go-round. Everyone on the talkback shows wanted to know why this had happened, and what we could do about it. Questions were asked with an earnest tone and there was much beating of the national chest.
And tougher sentencing, yet again everybody wanted tougher sentencing.
Then, as always happens, the world simply moved on. The kids all went off to jail, and disappeared off the national consciousness. BJ’s moment of fame had passed. People stopped asking questions, and things went on pretty much as they always have.
And in the constant state of media-induced Attention Deficit Disorder that the whole world seems to suffer from, we moved our outrage on to the next big issue.
When I did a quick tally of the kids I’ve seen this week alone, I had one kid under the age of 16 who I believe will kill somebody in the next year or so, one more who might in the next five years, three kids that will probably sexually reoffend some time in the next 18 months, and about a half-dozen who, for a variety of reasons, are well down the slippery slope to prison unless some miracle happens.
This is not an atypical week for me.
So we locked up BJ and his mates, but there’s a bunch more of them out there.
And I guarantee you one thing: none of them will be even vaguely influenced by the fact that BJ and his friends went to jail.
‘Do you remember those kids that went to jail for killing Michael Choy?’ I asked one kid. He was up on aggravated robbery charges and didn’t appear to care about anything.
‘Who?’
I sighed. ‘The pizza guy.’
He smiled. ‘Oh yeah, I knew them, bro.’
‘Who did you know?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘What did you think about what they did?’ I asked him.
‘It was funny, man.’
‘You think it was funny? A man died, and you think that’s funny?’
‘Getting busted for pizza, that’s fuckin’ funny, man.’
‘Would you do something like that?’
‘Fuck no,’ he says, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t get caught.’
Fortunately at the time I’m writing this, that particular kid is locked up. By the time you’re actually reading this, he’ll probably be out.
So don’t be under any illusions that any of these kids are going to be stopped by a fear of the consequences. If there’s one thing that distinguishes recidivist juvenile offenders, it’s the fact that consequences don’t appear to have a lot of impact on their behaviour.
There are a number of implications that flow on from this trial about how we manage the criminal prosecution of young people accused of serious crimes. It’s an issue that’s unlikely to go away. My best guess would be that initially defence lawyers will drive this debate, but over time I think we will be forced to examine the way we deal with young accused in a more systematic way. At some point I would imagine the government will ask a group of wise people to develop protocols to address these issues.
I believe that will be a good thing.
You can’t treat a juvenile defendant like an adult defendant. They don’t think or behave the same way. If we ignore that fact then young people will suffer for it. If they’re guilty, well I guess you could say they brought that suffering upon themselves, but what if they didn’t do it? I would imagine that the only thing worse than an innocent man in jail for a crime he didn’t commit would be an innocent kid in jail.
Still, that’s for the lawyers to work out. I’m a clinician and so my concern is more about how we stop kids from doing these things in the first place.
The thing that struck me the most about this group is that I would not have predicted any of them would have gone on to commit this kind of a crime. The one person with the longest history of behavioural problems was BJ himself. At the time of the attack on Michael Choy, he was out of school and on the run from a foster home.
I guess what really frightens me is that I have boxes and boxes of files on kids just like the ones in that group. I have spent years sitting in rooms with hundreds of young people just like them, more than I can count.
If I’d seen any of this particular group the day before they killed Michael Choy, I would not have predicted they were going to do such a thing. Nothing in their histories would have predicted what they did. I almost certainly would have said some of them were highly likely to keep committing various crimes, even violent ones, but I wouldn’t have said they were going to kill someone.
In hindsight you can look at their histories and say there were signs—like not being in school for instance—but that’s cheating, because looking back is easy. Looking back and blaming is the territory of the media and the politicians. For those of us who actually have to do the work, it’s often a waste of time.
Foresight is the hard thing, but it’s really the only thing that matters. The real question is not ‘who’s to blam
e for this?’ but rather ‘what do we do next?’
Following the conviction, the Ministers for Justice, Social Services and Employment, and Education asked for an interdepartmental review to examine the actions taken by the various agencies dealing with these young people. The report found there were three ‘common negative influences’:
Their families were unable to control their behaviour.
They were often absent or performing poorly at school.
They mixed with peers who reinforced their antisocial behaviour.
Amazing. Whoever would have guessed?
What’s more, the report went on to identify three key areas where ‘improvements are needed’:
Identifying the causes of, and effective interventions to address, criminal behaviour.
Keeping young people participating in education.
Ensuring effective training of, and coordination between, those tasked with responding to young offenders.
Again, equally amazing. The problem with all these nice reports is that someone actually has to sit down and try and do the things they say. Someone has to sit in a room with a kid like BJ and make him give a shit. Someone has to try ‘keeping young people participating in education’. As one of the people who currently tries to do just that, let me tell you it’s one thing to say it in a report, but it’s a whole other thing to actually do it.
The government is in the process of implementing Youth Offending Teams involving the police, social workers and other state agencies. The intervention model they propose is good, very good in fact, but it remains to be seen if it can overcome the politics. A senior social worker I spoke to said it sounded like a good idea but he wondered if it could survive the bureaucracy.
The way we are doing things at the moment isn’t working. We are being buried in an avalanche of screwed-up kids and families. Traditional approaches seem unable to keep pace with the scale of the problem. So how do we stop kids from doing bad things? How do we stop kids from committing senseless crimes like the killing of Michael Choy? And, just as importantly, how do we stop them from growing into adults who do bad things?
SEEING IN THE DARK
IT’S A FUNNY THING, isn’t it, the way the world changes when the sun goes down? Even the most familiar things become strange. Have you ever wandered around the house in the small hours of the night, perhaps on your way to the toilet or to get a glass of water, and felt the hairs on the back of your neck prickle? Ever felt the cold chill that only comes in the dead of night when you know you’re alone but suddenly feel that you’re not? The rules change when the sun goes down—we learn it as children and then spend the rest of our lives trying to pretend it isn’t so.
I remember when I was eight I had a recurring nightmare that an army of Wile E. Coyotes was coming to get me. In my dream they were just like in the Road Runner cartoons, except in my dream they seemed so much hungrier. Now it all sounds pretty stupid, but back then I remember being terrified.
I think we all forget what old Mr W. E. Coyote was intending to do to the Road Runner when he finally caught him. The scene we never got to see was the one where Wile’s sitting by the side of the road ripping off raw chunks off that cute little bird as the blood dribbles down his chin and the bones crackle. And you can just bet he’d be loving every coppery wet moment. He’d suck the marrow from the Road Runner’s still-warm bones. I knew it then and I still believe it now. Look at his eyes the next time you see the cartoon.
So there I am, eight years old, standing at my bedroom door in the dead of night looking down the dark hallway to where my parents are sleeping. Suddenly the hall seems a mile long. And there are far more doors now than when the lights were on. At eight I didn’t even stop to question the fact that physics and geography changed when the lights go out. Night rearranges things, all kids know that.
I could feel them in the darkness of each doorway, watching me. Studying me. A hundred Wile E. Coyotes with hungry eyes and cruel snouts brimming with teeth. I remember calculating the odds of making it all the way to the end of the hall. Slim to none.
Still, what choice did I have? They’d seen me, of that I was certain. Even though I was back in the shadows I knew their eyes worked better than mine did in the dark. They knew I knew they were there, and so of course they’d have to kill me.
In truth I thought I’d only make it to about the second door before they got me. There’d be a blur from the corner of my eye and then the terrible searing pain of teeth in flesh. I wouldn’t even have time to scream as they pulled me off into the dark and set about the business of fighting over the choicest pieces. In the morning all my family would find would be a bloody red smear.
This all sounds a bit over the top, I know, but can you remember what it was like being eight and scared of the dark? Can you remember? There is no top when you’re that age, there’s just the night and the things that live in it.
The longer I stood there, the worse the fear became. It felt as if my whole body was pulled tight as a wire. The skin on my arms and neck prickled. And that’s when I heard it, coming from the pitch-black of the doorway furthest from me, our supposedly empty laundry. Panting. Dull, hungry panting. Coyote panting.
Now, I know as an adult that this could not be, that probably it was just the sound of one of my brothers snoring, but I believed it then. At that moment I believed in that sound more than I believed in gravity, more than I believed in oxygen. The Wile E. Coyotes had come, hungry in tooth and claw, and if I didn’t move right then and there I would never see the daylight again.
So I did the only thing left to me, I made the only call I could. I ran.
Looking back now I don’t remember running, which is surprising since the rest of the memory is so clear. I suppose my brain may have just edited that bit out, or maybe I ran so fast there wasn’t a lot of thinking involved. Either way, next thing I’m standing in my parents’ room, shaking, staring back across the hall towards the blackness where the sound had come from. Now there was just silence.
A terrible expectant silence, as if everything was delicately poised. All it would take was a shiver to set it off. I couldn’t believe I’d made it. My skin felt electric, crackling the air it touched. I looked across at my parents’ bed and saw the two familiar shapes. Sleeping.
All I had to do now was wake them and I’d be safe. My mum and dad would chase the coyotes away. Not even an army of Wile E. Coyotes could stand against them. If I could just wake them before the thing in the shadows in front of me lunged, I’d be saved.
And it was at that precise moment, just as I was reaching out to wake my dad, that a nasty little thought wormed its way into my head. What if the reason the coyotes hadn’t taken me yet was that they already knew there was no rescue at the end of the hall? What if instead of my parents I found coyotes instead? Such things could happen. I was sure of it with all the terrible certainty small boys have been certain of night-time truths since time began.
I froze. Time seemed to stretch out in the darkness. ‘Dad?’ I whispered, my stomach curdling. What would I do if instead of an answer there were only the low chuckling snarl of a coyote?
‘Dad?’ A little louder this time. Rustling movement. I felt sick all the way through.
‘Dad?’
‘What?’ he muttered, half-asleep. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
It wasn’t a snarl, it was just my dad. And just like that, I was safe.
If only it were that simple for all kids. But of course we all know it isn’t, and I suppose I know that better than anyone. I’ve listened to their stories year after year, and I’ve learned that for some kids the coyotes are real.
Seeing in the dark. That’s what my job is really all about. I have to see the things they see. I have to go with them into their dark places and see the things they saw, hear the things they heard, feel the things they felt. The light is poor down here though, and I almost always need to use some magic spells to push back the shadows.
‘Tell me abou
t that,’ I say.
It’s a simple trick, but like all magic it should always be used with care. You say things like that down here and there’s no telling where you might end up. It can take you from the middle of a bright summer afternoon to the bottom of an endless night.
Jerry was my last appointment for the day, which was good because it was hot and humid, and even with the fan on full I was still sweating. One more hour to go.
He looked pretty much how you’d expect a man with his history to look. He was unkempt, with dirty black jeans and T-shirt. It looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and prison tattoos spread over his skin like some kind of infection. If looking like a criminal was an offence he would have been serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.
Jerry had done the rounds. He’d been in and out of jail since he was 15 on a string of convictions that included burglaries, car thefts, aggravated assaults, resisting arrest and disorderly behaviour. Drug and alcohol abuse had been liberally sprinkled on top of the whole merry pile like icing sugar on a hate cake.
Jerry had probably seen more people like me than I’d had hot dinners. He looked bored before I even opened my mouth. He’d been ordered to come and see me by his probation officer as a condition of parole. In his most recent lot of offending he’d got drunk and attacked someone in a bar. The fight ended with him smashing the other guy’s head into a post and breaking just about everything in the guy’s face without actually killing him.
If ever there was a man that seemed to offer some pretty solid support for the idea of tougher sentencing it was Jerry, because every time he got out of jail he seemed to do some crappy thing to someone or other. Surely the best idea was just to keep him in longer each time?
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s do the bullshit first.’ Then I proceeded to give him the obligatory rave about who I was, what I was doing and what the limits of confidentiality were. ‘Any questions about the bullshit?’ I asked when I was done.
