12-Year-Old Montclair Boy Arrested

1. According to the 11-year-old, they said “give us your bike and your helmet.”
   On the bright side, the town’s bicycle helmet safety campaign really seems to be working.

2. put those thugs in jail and throw away the key. today’s mugger is tomorrow’s murderer. my empathy goes out to the poor innocent child victimized in this increasingly violent town.
   just because its summer doens’t mean we have to stop acting decent to one another.
   *where are the parents in this town and what the h*ck kind of values are they teaching their children?*

3. In my day (early 60s), back in the ‘hood’, 15th – 18th and William @ EO/NWK border (Stockton School neighborhood) it was lunch money that was constantly getting jacked along with a few wigs. I must have been in over 100 incidents of extortion, threatened beatings, actual fights by the time I was 12. Nobody ever go arrested. You either kicked ass or got ass kicked and if you were lucky enough to have some ‘boys’ then people generally left you alone.
   🙂

4. (puss!!!! Too funny!!!)
   I thought today’s mugger was tomorrow’s cat burglar…

5. Quick shout out to my ‘boys’ from the Oval: Larry Brown, Tommy Fain, Stanley Edmundson, Gary Fogler, ‘Chicken’ Crawley. Egyptian Lords 4EVR.
   Sike!

6. MB – I wouldn’t exactly call the area around Anderson Park a “hood”.

7. Mayor Bike Boy needs to do his own dirty work if he wants to steal a bike, not send a group of kids out to do it for him.

8. epsphd,
   Thugs? “Throw away the key”? Overreact much?
   I’m not sure where you get your facts from, but could you let us know where to find the study that shows every kid who commits a robbery grows up to be a murderer?
   If that were true, there’s be a hell of a lot more murders.

9. *where are the parents in this town and what the h*ck kind of values are they teaching their children?*
   I ask this question constantly and I’ve never gotten a straight answer.
   To Nick Charles and others: 12 is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. If this lesson hasn’t been learned by then, it is a reflection on the parents.

10. Nick,
    The ‘strong arm’ stuff is pretty serious. Any kid who crosses this ‘line’ is ‘at risk’. I’m sure there are many who extorted money/goods from other kids during childhood and learned the error of their ways, were remorseful for their actions, and became fine, updstanding citizens. My gut and experience tells me that most never see the light and probably wind up dead or institutionalized.

11. I merely pointed out that throwing a kid in jail for life for robbing someone at 12 is a bit of an overreaction. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that every 12-year-old robber (even if there’s violence involved) turns into a murderer as an adult.
    I would also add that if most 12-year-olds who steal, rob, or hit some other kid “wind up dead or institutionalized,” we’d have a pretty large population of dead and institutionalized individuals.
    I never said the kid shouldn’t be punished, and I also never said his parents aren’t to blame. I just think throwing him in jail for life is crazy.

12. Amen, Marrtta.
    Nick, your kid was the one who was assaulted with a helmet, perhaps you would want justice and wonder just what I did.
    In today’s society, as 12 year old is no longer a child and certainly old enough to know right from wrong. Perhaps your lax attitude towards such a serious crime adds to the multitude of causality.

13. Whoops, forgot my *if* in that second paragraph above.
    Anyways, this is disgusting and this town is becoming increasingly more violent. Sometimes I think twice about leaving my home after sunset, especially in the warmer weather.

14. Back in my days as a 10 – 12 year old (the early 1990s), I too faced near daily attacks for my lunch money, skateboard, Game Boy or for walking too close (or heaven forbid, through) the neighborhood bullies’ turf… and this was in Montville, not Newark or East Orange. I think the combination of having a black belt and going through 90% of puberty by the age of 12 were the only things that kept me from taking more beatings than I did.
    It’s not so much that things have gotten any worse around here (by which I mean suburban America) as much as parents are way more sensitive about this sort of thing and the cops will actually do something about it without massive pressuring from the parents of the bullied.
    (For those not in the know: Montville is much closer to being Mayberry than everyone seems to think Montclair is)

15. We ALL wind up dead.

16. Even Mayberry had Eddie Haskell.

17. I’m wondering if this is becoming commonplace. My son just encountered a similiar incident last weekend. A group of kids confronted him and his friend while they were on their bikes at night by the CVS on Claremont. The kids claimed my son had their friends bike. Knowing darn well it wasn’t and sensing trouble, he and his friend wisely decide to get the heck out of there. The kids started to come after them and threw something at them but apparently thought better of it – probaby because my son and friend are 14 , 15 and pretty big kids. He didn’t tell us until much later, (embarrased, scared?) so we didn’t feel we could call the cops at that point.

18. actually Eddie Haskel wasn’t from Mayberry – he lived in whatever fictional town was home to “the Beav” and Wally.
    And doesn’t that take you down memory lane? How many times have I called a sneaky, yet brown nosing kid Eddie Haskel, only to be greeted with blank looks. You mean not everyone understands a reference to a 60’s show?

19. One big difference between today’s adolescent thugs and my generation’s is that mine used to ask us to “lend them” something. But since these were relatively non-materialistic days, that basically amounted to money or, at worst, a baseball mitt or sneakers. Today’s kids, in this sense (if in no other) have much too much that can be coveted by others.
    Years later, however, I took great pleasure in reading about or even attending the funerary rites of so many of the neighborhood bullies: gunshots from attempted store robberies, domestic violence incidents, the ravages of acute early alcoholism, OD’s, even, in one case, infection from a botched sex change operation. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away…even such scumbags.
    But, Mrs. Martta, Mayberry had only Opie. To the best of my memory, “Leave It To Beaver” was set in a much more suburban place, called Mayfield. And Eddie Haskell at his oleaginous best when complimenting June Cleaver on her pies was in no way even half as threatening as the thugs who’d ask me to “lend them” something. (Still, Ken Osmond became an LA cop, so there’s something to be said for the side of “nurture” in the famous old argument right there.)

20. Mrs M..the closet thing to trouble in Mayberry was Otis, the town drunk.

21. That’s right…it was Mayfield, my bad. I stand corrected. But you’re right, they bever really made reference to what state. We know that Mayberry was in NC, however.

22. Yes, Mayberry was supposedly in NC, and based on the once bucolic area across the sound from the Outer Banks, where Andy Griffith had actually grown up himself.
    Yet the last (fairly recent) time I drove through that area to visit someone on the OBX, I noticed an awful lot of gang tags on walls and billboards. Life goes on…

23. Mayberry was fine…all the trouble makers were from Pixley or Mt. Pilot.

24. David Carradine was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok. Looks like he hung himself.

25. I just saw that, mellonbrish. What the heck happened?

26. Kung Fu was my favorite show. I guess he was depressed or something. What a way to go.. ugh.

27. How horrible.

28. I hardly think this episode is an indication that Montclair’s crime rate is increasing. Unfortunately, bullying is nothing new.
    I give this kid a lot of credit for standing up for himself; pretty gutsy for a three or four (or more!) against one situation. I’m glad at least one of the kids got caught.

29. Guess this means my girl will not be hanging around uptown anytime soon. I let her do it once with a group, against my better judgment, because everyone told me, “Aw, let her grow up!” Well, Forget it! Complete lockdown, I say!
    Kudos to the 11-year old who ID’d the bully. Hope for his sake there’s no retaliation.

30. Snitches get stitches..no seriously though he shouldn’t have ratted the bully out like that, not a smart move

31. I agree that more active parenting could likely prevent this sort of incident. But we all need to be more active community members and step in when we see this kind of incident. Bellevue Ave is busy with traffic (both car and pedestrian) during daylight hours. I would guess that more than a few adults drove or walked right past this incident without so much as a second glance. Pay attention to what is going on around you and step in if you see something that doesn’t look right. We should all take responsibility for keeping the town safe for our children.

32. (HANGED himself. Object are hung, people are hanged…..)
    And what is with MKA kids tagging cars?
    Is there a gang problem at MKA?
    What’s next, cars with “CC” or “OBX” spray painted.
    These THUGS must be STOPPED!!!!

33. Kay,
    How old is your kid? Unless she’s still in the single digits, it probably is time to relax a bit.
    Yes, there are some bad apples out there and stuff like this is going to happen. But, at some point you need to realize that the odds of it happening to your child are very small.
    Just like the fact that most girls who go off to college don’t get raped, not every kid who hangs out with his/her friends outside of their parents immediate view is going to get mugged.

34. Ernest T. Bass (played by Howard Morris) was Mayberry’s miscreant breaking windows and such like Montclair’s Alan Duke. There were various other still operators who caused havoc by slighting the law or the Darling family would make the residents feel uncomfortable when they came to town.
    Leave It To Beaver is still shown on TV Land.
    If someone is more than 10 years old and they assault someone else, they are fully aware that it is unlawful and they are likely doing it because gives them a thrill.

35. “The boy was sent to Essex County Youth House. ”
    For being a bully?!?!?!?
    I was bullied way worse then this and no one was grounded let alone sent to kiddie stir.
    What am I missing from this story? Why wasn’t the punk handed released to his parents pending trial? Even if it was provoked by attempted bike theft is it really assualt if you hit a kid who was hitting you?

36. “David Carradine was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok. Looks like he hung himself. ”
    One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
    Not much between despair and ecstasy
    One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
    Can’t be too careful with your company
    I can feel the devil walking next to me

37. Is it really assault? They were pulling the victim’s bike with the intent to cause him harm in order to make off with the bike. Hell yes, that’s assault.

38. A peanut was walking down the road. He was assaulted. Peanut.

39. Caradine’s family & friends are helpfully suggesting that he accidentally hanged himself during a bout of erotic autoasphyxiation.

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