Homeless Shelter Attracting Pot Smokers to McDonald's Across the Street

Photo:  The new homeless shelter is the white building in the background.

 

When you change one thing, you may affect things around it.  

A regular customer at McDonalds at Main & Terminal says there are more "bums" standing around outside now that the new homeless shelter has opened across the street.  They congregate in front of McDonalds a little after 7 p.m., and hang out until shortly before 8 p.m. when the shelter opens.  The customer sometimes ducks outside himself to have a quick cigarette, so he knows who's who out there.

"Are they the ones smoking pot?," I asked.  "Yeah", the customer said.  On two evenings out of the last three, I walked through a cloud of strong pot smoke when going in the front entrance at McDonalds to buy a take-out coffee.  

When Mayor Robertson and his HEAT team turned the empty warehouse across the street from McDonalds into a homeless shelter, they probably thought that because the building was in an industrial area and situated well back from Main St., it wouldn't affect people in the neighborhood.  

Is this your son? I Told You to Come and Get Him.

He came back. Late Christmas night, turkey-stuffed Downtown Eastsiders meeting for hot chocolate at McDonalds at Terminal & Main St. spotted him. I had written about him previously in a Nov. 1 post, "Is this your son? Come and Get Him", when he dropped a needle on the floor in McDonalds.

When this addict-customer left on Christmas night, he dropped a five dollar bill which another male customer later picked up, saying, "There is a Santa Claus afterall."

Then the addict-customer returned to McDonalds a few minutes later on Christmas night and stood by the ketchup dispenser rummaging through his pockets. He asked the staff if they had found two CDs, but they hadn't.

Maybe that was his Christmas present.

McDonald's Asst. Mgr. Threatens to Call Police on Blogger

If Nike's slogan is "Just do it," McDonald's could be "Just wash it."

On the evening of Sun. Dec. 7, a customer in McDonald's restaurant at Main & Terminal near Science World -- that was the day of the Santa Claus parade so it had been busy in McDonald's -- went to the washroom and left her coat on her chair. When she returned, her coat was gone. She asked the cashiers about it and one young male with "Ali" on his name tag said, "I threw it in the garbage."

Ali, who has short dark hair, a calm demeanor, and appears to be of middle eastern descent, walked over to the garbage can and, as the customer watched, fished her coat out. He had to reach down under several trays of garbage and food scraps to find it. 'It had ketchup and grease on it from other people's food", said the customer.

"Just wash it," Ali said calmly, shrugging. The woman was upset and said she thought McDonalds should buy her a new coat. The Assistant Manager, Jennie, a young, thin, white woman with long dark hair, said that wouldn't happen. She used the exact words Ali had used, "Just wash it."

Jennie defended Ali, saying that he had been doing his job as "floor workers" are trained to do it. If there is an empty tray, she explained, the floor workers are under instructions to throw everything away.

When Jennie later realized that this incident was going to be reported on the internet, she insisted that she had never said that tossing coats in the garbage was official McDonalds policy. She asked Ali to back her up on that and he agreed. The boss is always right.

Jennie stated then that if her handling of this incident was reported on the internet, "I'll call the police." She repeated a second time that she would call the police, saying, "It's illegal to put somebody's name on the internet."

Not only the woman's coat but the contents of the pockets ended up in the garbage: her house keys, ear phones, and gloves. She hadn't realized when she went to the washroom that her keys were still in her coat pocket; usually she carries a purse. So she was grateful to find that they hadn't been lost in the garbage. When she got home she noticed that two of the keys were bent though. That could have resulted from the compressor inside the garbage can which presses the garbage to make it more compact. Her ear phones were still in her pocket too. But she was missing a glove.

And McDonald's is missing a customer.

(Above photo: McDonalds at Main St. & Terminal Ave. on the night of Dec. 24, 2008)

Teenagers Visit Parking Lot Memorial for Chris Poeung

A large mound of about 20 bouquets of flowers appeared today on the pavement in the parking lot across from the Main St. Skytrain Station. The flowers appeared at the exact spot where Chris Poeung, 13, lay after being fatally stabbed late yesterday afternoon, allegedly by a 14 year old boy.

All afternoon, teenagers came and went. They stood around the bouquets of flowers in the almost empty parking lot, talking, in the Vancouver drizzle. There were neatly printed messages on some of the bouquets at their feet:

"R.I.P. baby bro,
I love you lots and I miss you."
Melay

"You were like a brother to me."
Annie Tran

"...you will never be forgotten."
Deanna Tran

At about 6:15 p.m., when I last went by, there were 10 young people standing by the bouquets.

A tree at the edge of the parking lot, a few meters south of the mound of flowers on the pavement, had a new, white, spray-painted message on it: a heart and below it the large letters, "R.I.P. C.P." A piece of yellow police tape lay twisted on the grass below. Nearby on the grass, somebody had placed a round container of bright pink flowers.

Local residents dropping into McDonalds next door for coffee were talking about the fact that Chris Poeung had died. Barry, a pensioner who has lived on Downtown Eastside for 30 years said that after leaving McDonalds yesterday, one of the Asian teenagers was in such a hurry to get out of that parking lot that, "He almost knocked me over." But Barry is street smart. He believes there is a history between some of these teenagers that we don't know about: "Somebody doesn't just start stabbing people for no reason."

CTV has since spoken to Chris Poeung's girlfriend, Cathy Le, who said the fight that resulted in Poeung's death was over a girl. But Poeung was not even directly involved, she said.

Stabbing Near McDonalds Leaves Boy, 13, Dead

Update:
Stabbing victim, Chris Poeung, died late last night in hospital. He was born Mar. 3, 1994 and was 13 years old.

Witnesses saw the suspect leave the scene of the stabbing and hop on the #19 bus. Police reportedly took him off the bus as it headed up Kingsway. There are reports that a second person was also taken into custody but released.

There were a total of four teenagers stabbed. Three had injuries that were not life threatening.

The following article was posted yesterday, shortly after I left the scene of the stabbing.
----------------------------------------

A teenage girl called her mother today and told her to come to the parking lot at Terminal & Main. Her brother, Chris Poeung, had just been stabbed.

It was about 5:15 or 5:20 p.m. I had just left McDonalds next door with a take-out coffee in my hand. I saw a swarm of Asian teenagers, both male and female, crossing the parking lot at Main & Terminal -- the parking lot kitty corner from the Pacific Central Station -- headed towards McDonalds. Some of the boys in the huge group were fighting. But it seemed to be over quickly.

Then I saw about three boys looking back as they rushed from the parking lot, at least one of them holding a cell phone. I got the impression that for them this fight wasn't over. But I really didn't pay much attention and kept walking.

Then I heard some girls in the parking lot screaming as they stood over an individual lying on the pavement. I went over to see if I could help. There was a pool of blood around a young Asian man in a white track suit. The white top of his track suit was soaked in blood. It was obvious that he had been stabbed near the heart. He had also been stabbed on the chin.

I told the victim to hang on, that an ambulance was on the way. I kept repeating that. I had read about an accident victim who said that having a person beside them reassuring them that the ambulance was on the way was helpful. The victim seemed to have almost lost consciousness, and by the time help arrived would be completely unconscious. One of the teenage girls standing near the victim's feet began crying, a scared sounding crying.

Later another woman passerby crouched down and put her hands on the sides of the victim's head and talked softly to him, continuously. Yet another woman passing by was on her cell phone to police saying, "I didn't realize that I had witnessed a stabbing."

A young woman with long dark hair who looked like a teenager came over. She said she was the victim's sister. She had apparently not witnessed the stabbing but may have been with the large group of teenagers as it took her just a couple of minutes to get to the scene. She screamed for a second when she saw the massive amount of blood that her brother was lying in. A couple of minutes later, she got on her cell phone and called her mother. She was crouched beside me as she made the call asking her mother to come to the parking lot across from the Main St. Skytrain station, saying, "Somebody's been stabbed." She must have been pressed to provide more information over the phone as she then stated in a calm voice that it was Chris who had been stabbed.

"The suspect", I would later hear a female police officer say into her phone, "goes to Tupper School." I believe the officer also identified him as "Thai."

Just a few seconds after I had arrived in the parking lot to see if I could help, I noticed a local mechanic, Garrett, on his knees by the victim. Garrett, a very young looking 43 year old originally from Winnipeg, works at a car repair shop nearby and drops into McDonald's almost daily to have coffee with local residents.

Garrett was using his bare hands to apply pressure over the wound by the victim's heart. He kept his hands there until the fire department paramedics arrived about 10 minutes later.

Later as he washed the blood off his hands with a cleansing gel police had given him, I asked Garrett, who I know from the McDonalds koffee klatch, "How did you know to do that?" He said he had taken a first aid course as "a form of self-improvement" two months ago out in Surrey where he has just moved. (He used to live on a boat behind McDonalds in False Creek, until all the boat squatters got evicted.) "That was good timing," I said.

It had seemed to take a long time for the paramedics to arrive: I would say 10-12 minutes, but I wasn't wearing a watch. And because everybody standing around was desperately waiting for the ambulance, time may have seemed to go slowly. The Vancouver Police were first to arrive, then the Fire Department paramedics, then the first of two ambulances. When the first police car arrived, I said to the female officer, "Where's the ambulance? We've been waiting ten minutes." She ignored me and looked at the victim.

The female police officer made the same call that a number of others had already made on cell phones, a request for an ambulance. She said into her phone, as she squatted by the victim's head, he was "not doing well." The officer then took over the job of talking to the victim. At one point, I thought the victim had died; he went completely still but then seemed to get a second wind and took a couple of deep breaths. I said to his sister, "You talk to him, he knows your voice." She leaned in toward him and started to speak but the police officer told her to move back and give him more space. The officer continued talking to him.

When the first paramedics from the Fire Department did get to the victim, three of them worked swiftly and calmly, putting a clear plastic mask over his mouth and cutting off his blood-drenched shirt. About five minutes later, the ambulance showed up. Then a woman showed up, who I believe may have been the mother of the victim. She stood outside the yellow police tape surrounding the scene and spoke to the sister.

A second victim, a young male with a bloody wound to his arm, sat on a curb in the parking lot near where the first had been laying. He was tended to by paramedics and may have been put in a second ambulance that arrived.

A young male police officer politely gave the order that nobody was to leave the scene. Police corralled everybody at the side of the parking lot, on the grass. They spoke to the sister and several witnesses, many of whom were teenagers. After about 10 minutes, police let me go as I had really not paid attention to the faces of any of those involved in the fight.

Garrett was still trying to get the blood off his hands. He pointed to the bottle of cleansing gel on the grass and asked, "Could you squirt more of that on my hands?"

A stocky, middle-aged firemen walked over to us and asked Garrett for his name, after the ambulance had left. The fireman commented that the victim had lost a lot of blood. He made a point of commending Garrett: "That kid has a chance because of you."