Under the Bridge (31 page)

A
T THE
S
AANICH STATION,
Sergeant Chris Horsley held an extraordinarily well-attended press conference.

Though the media had not yet learned of how or why Reena Virk died, the interest was nonetheless relentless. For the next few weeks, the
Times-Colonist
would run daily front-page stories on any related issue: bullying, the shrine on the bridge, the yellow ribbons—“a pledge to nonviolence” worn by students at Shoreline. These stories appeared under the headline:
DEATH OF A TEENAGER.
Above
DEATH OF A TEENAGER,
Reena's yearbook photo was shadowed, so her face appeared merely as a black silhouette.

“We have many, many more people that still need to be interviewed and spoken to,” Sergeant Chris Horsley said, surely sending a chill through the youth of View Royal, many of whom tossed away the business cards of detectives because they “didn't want to get involved.”

“Any murder investigation is huge,” he continued, “but we're dealing with eight accused in this case. It puts an incredible burden on investigators. And there could be more arrests. Other names have come up in the rumor mill.”

“Was the murder gang related?” a journalist asked.

“Police agencies recognize gangs as those that are organized and criminal, such as you'll see in the southern United States. That's not what's going on here. All of these teenagers live in the same area, and they all hang out together, but they're not a gang per se.”

“What are their parents saying?”

“Well, a lot of them are in a state of denial that their children have been involved in what someone described as a horrific incident. A lot of detectives have teenage children, and they're experiencing disbelief themselves. It's been a bit of a shock, not just for us but for the community. I think there are going to be a lot of people in this city and across
the country who are going to shake their heads tomorrow and say, ‘How did this happen? How did juvenile fourteen-year-olds come to be implicated in the death of another young girl?'”

T
HE TOWNSPEOPLE
discussed the question endlessly. “How did this happen? How did juvenile fourteen-year-olds come to be implicated in the death of another young girl?”

Because morality is lost, Alice Klyne believed. When a city turns its back on God, the end results are, sadly, all too predictable. We have lost our moral compass, and our young people are raised in a moral vacuum, where sex and violence are the norm both on television and in real life. We have forsaken our godly heritage, and there are no longer any moral absolutes in our society, nor is there any fear of a God many simply no longer believe in.

Since learning an explanation for a scene she witnessed on Saturday from her window, Ruth McVeigh thought about what has happened to teens since she was one, half a century ago. To begin with, there was no television. “In my first decade, I hadn't watched hundreds of thousands of people being murdered in the guise of entertainment.” Her mother was there when she came home from school. She listened. She hugged. But now the family is disintegrating, and if youngsters don't feel like important members of a family group, well, they look for another group to belong to, a gang. “I sense these children are filled with a global anger. They are missing something they'd never had. Those were the ones who commit vandalism, get into fights, seek to escape unhappiness through the abuse of drugs.” Those were symptoms, rather than a disease.

Rosalind Karadimas didn't think the problem was television or loss of God. A fourteen-year-old girl's body was dumped in the Gorge! Where are the parents? All this money was being spent curtailing youth violence, and a fourteen-year-old girl was killed. Well, the government should get tougher and “show these abusers that we're serious about shutting down youth crime.” And the question really to be answered is:

Where are the parents? All this talk about “it takes a community to raise a child,” that was flat-out wrong. A father and mother would be sufficient.

Ron McIsaac disagreed. MP Keith Martin was looking to get tougher on youth crime and throw more kids in jail, but didn't he realize that almost all violent criminals were sex abuse victims in childhood?

These kids were not normal, Mrs. Kirk believed. All these people saying Reena Virk had “normal” teenage problems. But, normal kids go to school. They participate in sports. They work. They live at home. My deepest sympathy goes to the Virk family, but really, as a society, we need to reevaluate what is normal.

Michel Murray, well, he'd warned people. He'd written a letter to the
Times-Colonist,
and they'd published it, although they'd spelled his name incorrectly. It was Michel, not Michael. Anyway, he had hardly expected such brutal confirmation of his warning to come so soon. He warned people about what was going on in the schools! The district chairperson should be let go immediately before another penny of tax money was squandered on her. And the rest of the school district bureaucracy and most of the Ministry of Education should be given the boot too. They were all utterly incompetent. Schools should provide safety, not “grief counseling” when one student was murdered by a group of others. Get rid of the district chairperson, and bring back my old elementary school principal, Mr. Kucey. Roust him right out of retirement, and give him absolute authority over all schools in the district. He can't undo all the damage of this so-called progressive education, but by the end of the year, I predict he'll restore discipline and safety. And maybe next year, he could restore genuine learning in subjects like English and math. Of course, I don't expect my suggestion to be even entertained, much less followed. I expect more hand wringing, more grief counseling, above all more yadda, yadda, yadda. Oh yes, and more violence.

My God, C.J. Charlebois declared. How many more children must die before we wake up? The brutal slaying of Reena Virk is the ultimate outcome of a government that murders children and gets away with it. I
worked for the Youth Services Bureau in Ottawa twenty years ago, and I had four young boys as my caseload. Four! I was out on the streets at 3:00
A.M.
searching for runaways. I was at the hospital with parents poisoned by drugs and alcohol. I intervened in severe physical abuse. I searched for guns hidden in bedroom drawers. I dealt with police frustration and brutality. Now I've read about social workers who have caseloads of thirty or more clients. Thirty! I read about children dying on a regular basis. I read about expensive reports written by politicians and academics that lead nowhere. Enough is enough! Listen. Do you hear the children crying? Do you hear them screaming?

Gary Allen was surprised there weren't more of these beating deaths. Hey, he'd been a probation officer for twenty-three years, and he'd seen a half dozen of these teen murderers. It's not like these are the first ones. These kids these days, they're obsessed with violence. If you listen to their conversation, it's all about violence. They say, “I'm going to kill him,” or “I'm going to beat her up good.” And the parents, say, “My kid's not capable of killing someone.” “I dealt with David Muir's family. You know, he was a teen killer. He was convicted of killing his buddy's grandmother and mother for the insurance money. And his parents didn't believe it. If there was ever one kid on the surface who didn't look capable of killing someone, David was it. My sense is these kids are way beyond their parents' ability to control them.”

These stupid kids, Denise Helm wrote in her column in the
Times-Colonist.
Try Los Angeles if you really want to join a gang. As the cruel drama of Reena Virk's murder unfolds, it is fueling the same sick playacting that cheapened her death. Every time anyone likens the vicious violence to Los Angeles gangs, they are giving these stupid kids exactly what they want. Attention. And for all the wrong reasons. It's time to shut this game down. To the punk shaking his hand in a “gang” symbol in the background of a television broadcast at the murder scene: Why don't you go to LA's bleak, desperate ghettoes and see what it really means to be a gang member?

Denise Gemmel felt really angry at the local media. She was angry and frustrated with all this sensationalized TV coverage resulting from Reena Virk's senseless murder. And it really bothered her that the media
were focusing on Shoreline School. It was true that some of the accused did attend Shoreline School. But the reality is, there are 360 students at Shoreline, and those accused are a very small percentage. In a community trying to come to grips with the horror and trauma of this incident, we need not have all our children included under the same terrible banner. There are good kids in Shoreline School—kids who work hard to be on the honor roll, kids who have jobs and perform community service, kids who have respect for their teachers, who have parents who care about them, kids who have morals and values and who are having a hard time living through this nightmare that has become their daily existence. The painful process of trying to make sense of this tragedy is made even harder under the microscopic glare of reporters and news cameras. Because let's face it, whatever happened under the Craigflower Bridge is not a school problem. Whatever happened under the bridge is a problem within our society.

A
T THE
U
NIVERSITY OF
V
ICTORIA,
Dr. Sybelle Artz checked her voice mail. NBC had called yesterday. She sighed to herself, counting the pink slips. Twenty calls she had to return, and a photographer was scheduled to arrive in her office in a few minutes. It's madness, she said to her secretary. Since the death of Reena Virk, Dr. Sybelle Artz had found herself described as: the hottest expert in the country.

Her ethnography for the past decade had been among the sudden scourge: the Violent Suburban Schoolgirl. Dr. Artz had identified such tribes as the Beastie Girls, young women who listened to the Beastie Boys and engaged in antisocial behavior. She was no mere pop psychologist; she offered no sound bites, but rather sentences such as, “Violence is a rule bound and purposeful activity engaged in to redress the intolerable balances girls perceive in their largely hierarchical social world.”

The good fortune of Dr. Artz was due to her publication, this very month, of a book with a title both alluring and academic:
Sex, Power and the Violent School Girl.

As the media called, every day and constantly, she was quite happy to oblige, for as she warned, “Youth violence is more intense, vicious, and deadly than ever before.”

Searching the hallways of a high school in East Vancouver, Suzanne Fournier, a
Vancouver Province
reporter, located some specimens of this current scourge. A seventeen-year-old honor student named Donna let her know that “chicks can do a lot more damage than guys—they're a lot more violent.” Monique agreed: she just “lost it” after a girl left taunting messages on her pager. “I just felt this kind of uncontrollable rage and I went for her neck—I could have hurt her bad.” Honor roll student Donna was another potential menace to society, for she was “a slow burner, but when I get mad, I go right to rage.”

Overnight, it seemed, in cafés and in offices, in newsrooms and in bars, a new preoccupation was born. The attack on Reena Virk could not be written off as a single aberration, for there were seven girls fighting, and so many more who watched, who did nothing. These girls—they broke arms and legs, they stubbed out cigarettes on flesh, they set hair on fire. And these girls were not just on an idyllic island but inside everyone's daughters perhaps, just waiting to rise and go right to rage.

A national magazine published a story called “Bad Girls” wherein reporters examined the case of Reena Virk and announced the fact that violence among young girls was “sharply on the rise.” Often, the article warned, “the fever seems to rise because of boys. To a chilling degree, very young girls are desperate to be mated.”

Dr. Ray Corrado, an expert on violence, cautioned the public not to panic: “The vast majority of young girls are doing what young girls have always done: attend school, pursue hobbies, flirt.”

Prior hysterias had gripped the nation. Satanic cults. Yuppie greed. Pedophiles in day care centers. Latchkey kids. Bad girls were the latest concern, as exaggerated and distorted as past menaces that emerged, shimmered, and vanished so suddenly. No one spoke to the vilified girls now in cells, and the girls now in cells spoke to no one. Their stories stayed unknown. “Are these gang girls or cheerleaders?” a movie producer asked a journalist, inquiring into the potential for an M.O.W.—Movie of the Week. It all became so simple to comprehend. Reena was an “overweight misfit,” while her attackers were “remorseless” and “troubled.” The reality of all their lives, the reality of why girls erupted and kicked and screamed, seemed destined, despite the 2,679 media articles, to remain as hidden and dark as the red codes of graffiti under the bridge.

•   •   •

What would the academics have made of Lily?

Lily who was pale and famished, still a little dazed from her daily dose of Ativan.

On the day Dr. Sybelle Artz dealt with her phone messages and Don Morrison contemplated charts and strategy, Lily sat cross-legged in her cell in juvie, braiding the loose threads on her blanket.

Like Nadja and Anya she was not a fan of police, and yet she did not know who to turn to now. She could not stop shaking. There were
goosebumps on her arms. Arianna would be disgusted if she told her what she was about to do. Maybe. Maybe Arianna would agree, but she couldn't risk asking Arianna for advice. She'd been trembling since the night before, since she'd heard what she'd heard in the bathroom.