April 16, 2013 - 1:44 PM
Fred Kesler strolls through his neighbourhood on Peachland's San Clemente Avenue, mere metres from the spot where 16-year-old Ashlee Hyatt was stabbed by a friend and bled to death nearly 2 1/2 years before.
A jury ruled Sunday that Hyatt died of a wound from a knife swung by a friend. Kesler couldn't help but remember the days when he taught school.
"The biggest weapon kids brought to school then were their knuckles," he says. "If they needed the next biggest weapon, they'd bring their friends. Things have changed now, I think."
The tragedy of Ashlee Hyatt's death is surrounded in the facts of that June night when and where she died. Two lawyers and a judge with all the facts will determine the degree of culpability. But while the court narrows its focus, we are all left with greater, more complex questions; an invitation, should we accept it, to have this conversation among youth, between parents and their children and parents to parents about how it got that far.
This wasn't gangland, it was Peachland. Two local girls—friends—at a party. One now dead, one now a killer.
Hyatt wasn't simply killed by a girl with a knife. Backwards in time from that moment, hundreds of decisions were made in a situation many youth and adults alike may find themselves. Too much alcohol, even among friends. Tensions rise. Sides are taken. Violence looms. Then what? Run? Fight? Get help? Even the odds with a knife?
Sarah MacKinnon is director for Kelowna's Downtown Youth Centre which works with high-risk youths. She can't speak to this case in particular, few can. But the pattern is there. The nature of violence itself, she says, is that it can happen at the blink of an eye and be fuelled by sudden emotion, booze or drugs and perhaps seated on a more foundational level. Childhood factors, such as physical or emotional trauma in the family home that can leave us without the necessary tools to appropriately respond to a given challenge.
"When tempers flare and things get heated and escalate and get out of hand, are you surprised in that situation that somebody might die? Probably not," she says. "It can happen very quickly and really easily, whether someone is using their knuckles or using a weapon. Once you're in that mindset, it's really hard to bring them down, to pull them back, to stop that escalation once it's been put in motion."
Still, the act of bringing a knife into the fray seems disproportionate. And let the lesson be learned: even if it was simply intended to scare her opponents, an escalation in arms invites an escalation in consequences.
The scene on June 2, 2010 was one of an unsupervised party in which some teens, notably the one who was later convicted (she cannot be named by court order), drank several shots of whisky from the bottle beforehand and continued drinking in the same manner at the party. A witness, Michael Baxter, said the girl was "super drunk," shortly before the incident. It was a recipe for poor decisions.
"It causes our inhibitions to be lowered," says Amanda Donaldson, a mental health clinician with the Downtown Youth Centre. "It causes our reactions to emotional situations to be not as astute as they would be. I would argue that it is a contributing factor, but not everyone who drinks becomes violent."
Added to that was the confrontation in which Hyatt and two others, according to testimony, engaged in aggressive name-calling toward the convicted girl. The girl, upset that a boyfriend refused to talk to her about the kissing incident, was physically separated from him and he warned her to stay away. Later, the girl said she felt "ganged-up on" and found herself fighting with Hyatt and one other girl.
So the situation was one of raw emotion, exacerbated by alcohol. But how did it jump to wielding a weapon?
In this case, we don't know. But typically, despite the haze of booze and emotion, the answer could be found in something in childhood, Donaldson says, whether we see violence in the home or on television we watch or the video games we play. We learn by watching others. And if we see violence, we may repeat it.
"I see a lot of trauma," Donaldson says. "Lots of family history or some family history of substance abuse. Family breakdown. Poverty. Employment issues with parents trickling down to their kids, like the lack of education sometimes. We talk about societal oppressors. That goes with criminal behaviour, drug and alcohol abuse, family breakdown, trauma and abuse. Those are all things that impact that child growing up in the environment -- the ability to adapt and function and cope."
Donaldson said a healthy, loving family is essential in a child's development and influences much about the way the child will react to conflict later in life. Trouble is, the principle also applies in reverse to parents who grew up the same way. Then where does it begin anew? That's where the Downtown Youth Centre comes in, to provide a more healthy environment.
"We talk a lot about us demonstrating to the youth that we can go through conflict with each other and with them in a successful way and it will all turn out OK in the end," she says, "without anyone having to have broken the relationship or hurt each other.
"We can mess up and get through that."
Not for this case, not with the consequences of escalation. With lessons learned, maybe the next one.
News from © iNFOnews, 2013