Olympics "Civil City Slam" marred by hypocrisy

In Vancouver you will find sailing, hiking, skiing. And fighting. Vancouverites are fighting over preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics, preparations that involve efforts to curb aggressive panhandling, sleeping, crack smoking, pissing and even shitting on the streets by Vancouver’s underclass.

On the right is Mayor Sam Sullivan. Sullivan introduced “Project Civil City” earlier this year to curb “public disorder” in Vancouver. The Civil City initiative, the Mayor has officially announced, will target homelessness, the open drug market, aggressive panhandling, and will attempt to increase satisfaction with how public nuisance complaints are handled.

On the left is Member of Parliament Libby Davies and others she refers to as “progressive electeds” and activists. The left takes the position that the Mayor’s Civil City erodes civil liberties of the poor and addresses symptoms of poverty rather than underlying causes.

On Tuesday evening, representatives of Vancouver’s left came together in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the poorest neighbourhood in Canada, to criticize the Mayor’s Project Civil City. They called the event, “Civil City Slam”.

The Forum was chaired by Libby Davies, known simply as “Libby” by many on the Downtown Eastside where low income people vote for this federal politician en masse. Davies told the crowd in the church auditorium that Project Civil City will hurt the poor while making Vancouver “squeaky clean” for the Olympics.

In the leaflet widely distributed to advertise the Civil City Slam, a column by left-leaning Allan Garr in the Vancouver Courier newspaper was re-printed. Garr had mentioned this month’s visit by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin to address the Vancouver Board of Trade about Atlanta’s 1996 Summer Olympics experience. Franklin admitted that Altanta had made a mistake by investing in temporary shelters to get the homeless off the streets, only to discover after the Olympics that when the shelters disappeared, the homeless reappeared. What Franklin had not spoken about though, Garr wrote, was the civil liberties mistakes made in Atlanta during the Olympics:

“What she didn’t mention was this: Before the games, Atlanta passed a half dozen laws that made it illegal to panhandle aggressively, urinate in public, lay on a park bench and - my favorite – walk across a parking lot if you don’t have a car parked there. Homeless activists in Atlanta report the laws were later thrown out. But over the course of the games, thousands of homeless men were arrested.”

Inside the Civil City Slam at First United Church there was a standing room only crowd. To get in though, you had to pass a man on the steps handing out literature accusing Israel of apartheid, and a woman at the door of the auditorium with a table of literature which included Anti-Poverty Committee leaflets accusing Olympic Committee director, Ken Dobell, of being a “capitalist hog”.

David Eby: civil liberties abuses could result from changes ranging from new police powers to charge civilians and a “broad interpretation” of who is sufficiently mentally ill to be institutionalized

One of the first speakers was David Eby, a tall, thin, young lawyer with light brown curly hair who works for Pivot Legal Society. Eby mentioned media reports that City Councilors and Olympic Committee directors are feeling threatened by the Anti-Poverty Committee which recently stated an intent to evict Olympic Committee directors from their comfortable offices and homes, just as poor people are being evicted from their homes during preparations for the Olympics. (The APC had just hours earlier carried out an eviction by trashing the Vancouver office of Olympic Committee director Ken Dobell, within the Canada Place offices of Premier Gordon Campbell.) Eby pointed out that for the Olympic Committee, “the biggest threat to what they have planned is meetings like this.”

Eby said he has already noticed an erosion of civil liberties on the Downtown Eastside as the City prepares for the Olympics. He mentioned the raid on the offices of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association by police searching for the stolen Olympic flag, even though another organization had taken credit for stealing it.

Regular reports by Downtown Eastside residents of getting “jacked up” are another sign in Eby’s view, that civil liberties are being eroded as Vancouver gears up for the Olympics. Eby explained that each pair of police officers working the streets of the Downtown Eastside is expected to meet a daily quota of civilians they have had a conversation with. What that conversation entails, he said, is taking the person’s name and running it through the police computer system for no reason. These quotas work out to 303 people being stopped a day on the Downtown Eastside. That’s “the kind of civil society” the neighborhood is being subjected to. If you do the math, Eby explained, it works out to every resident of the Downtown Eastside being stopped six times a year. Eby got his point across, but the reality is that myself and my friends and acquaintances on the Downtown Eastside not involved in street life are not finding ourselves randomly stopped by police.

Eby says Project Civil City is bringing in a “No sit, no lie” bylaw. Anyone who walks around Vancouver knows who this bylaw is aimed at: the homeless who sleep for hours on benches and sidewalks both day and night. But Eby says that even people who hang around on a park bench can be targeted.

Project Civil City will also tackle aggressive panhandling, the open drug market, and public nuisance complaints, according to Eby, by allowing police to directly lay charges. Previously Vancouver Police had to wait for Crown prosecutors to approve charges. Crown prosecutors, Eby explained, tend to be more cautious than police, throwing out cases for such reasons as evidence being collected through an illegal search. Police are being given these new powers, Eby believes,“because the Crown is just getting in the way.”

Another tool police may finally be given on the Downtown Eastside is close circuit television cameras, according to Eby. Cameras to fight the open drug market and other crime have been proposed over the years by police, only to be opposed by the left wing establishment at Carnegie Centre which publishes the popular Carnegie newsletter.

“New drug treatment programs for chronic offenders”, are a specific Civil City strategy that Eby thought needed more discussion. New approaches to drug treatment will include, if Mayor Sullivan has his way, an expansion of NAOMI, a drug maintenance program on the Downtown Eastside which a couple of years ago began dispensing free heroin to addicts. But City Councilor Raymond Louie, who lent his name to the Civil City Slam brochure as an endorser, says opening a “pharmacy” for the city’s 700 chronic offenders would be irresponsible, without integrating them into the community. Eby’s concern about the focus on chronic offenders, he told spectators at the Slam, is the possibility that, “If you want to get into this innovative drug treatment, first you have to get arrested, and you probably have to plead guilty.”

Institutionalization of the very mentally ill is yet another goal of Civil City, Eby told the crowd. But here’s the problem, he said: “There is no real definition of who the very mentally ill is. I suspect there could be a very broad interpretation of that.”

When it comes to employing a very broad interpretation of mental illness for institutionalizing people, though, some of the “progressive electeds” who endorsed this Civil City Slam in promotional literature – Vancouver School Board trustees Allan Blakely and Allan Wong, for example — are in no position to point fingers.

With Blakely and Wong as trustees, the Vancouver School Board had been accused of political psychiatry, using an interpretation of mental illness broad enough to muzzle a political adversary. The Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog has obtained a police and psychiatric report in one well known case in which a political adversary was targeted by the Vancouver School Board. It was a case in which the Vancouver School Board arranged to have a Downtown Eastside resident targeted for an “assessment for apprehension” immediately after that resident expressed in writing an intent to campaign in the School Board election, then just 3 weeks away. This resident and several others on the Downtown Eastside were were fed up after independently lodging complaints against a verbally and physically abusive teacher, only to receive evasive and at times hostile responses from the VSB.

The Vancouver School Board, dominated by left wingers at the time who knew that they were about to lose their elected majority, hastily arranged to have the notorious police “Car 87” – a police car containing a constable and a psych nurse – visit and assess the prospective campaigner for “apprehension”. A letter in which the individual had stated an intent to campaign in the election, a letter which included a routine freedom of information request, was the sole evidence filed with police and the psych system to support this visit. In the accompanying psych report, nurse Don Getz entered the fact that this DTES resident had made “freedom of information requests” as the official reason for the assessment.

Just hours after the visit, VPD Sergeant Garry Lester admitted in a taped telephone conversation that he had emphasized to the VSB, when they were arranging the visit, that there was “nothing untoward” about this DTES resident’s letter.

In 2005, VSB trustees — including the few left wingers who had managed to keep their seats as trustees, Blakely (pictured left) and Wong — held an in-house review of the case and did not invite or allow input from the targeted individual. The targeted individual claims that political psychiatry instigated by the VSB shortly before the Nov. 2004 election has resulted in ongoing harassment, for which there is supporting evidence in the form of letters and voice mail from police.

Stories of political psychiatry perpetrated by members of the left wing establishment in the Downtown Eastside, which has been dubbed Canada’s “socialist experiment”, are rampant. Carnegie Centre, which sent a representative to sit on the panel of the Civil City Slam has been accused of at time favoring a politically convenient, broad interpretation, of mental illness. During a “Never trust a nurse” poster campaign on the Downtown Eastside in 2005-06 to fight alleged nurse involvement in political psychiatry, an allegation specifically against the Carnegie Street Nurse Program of collusion with political psychiatry surfaced and has yet to be resolved.

Even former mayoral candidate, Peter Haskell, recently alleged that he had become the target of psychiatric tactics at Carnegie. He told Vancouver's Republic newspaper that when he expressed opposition to user fees at Carnegie, a staff person telephoned his mother and recommended that he be put on medication.

Andy Yan: Civil City is based on the “broken windows” theory in the U.S.

Andy Yan, a chubby Chinese-Canadian man in his late twenties or early thirties, works for the Carnegie Centre Action Project which has an office on the Downtown Eastside. Yan told the crowd at the Slam that Civil City is based on the “broken windows” theory in the U.S. which Carnegie sees as the wrong approach to addressing street disorder. What has actually been proven to work in both the U.S. and Canada, Yen said, is “permanent homes as opposed to shelter beds.” He also wants welfare rates increased by 50% from current levels (the basic welfare rate has recently been raised by $100), and an elimination of barriers to getting welfare such as the 3 week waiting period. The position of the Carnegie Action Project, Yan said, is that we can “eliminate the symptom of homelessness by eliminating the causes.”

It came as no surprise to Downtown Eastside residents that Yan focused on housing for the homeless, not civil liberties for the homeless. Carnegie Action Project staff work out of the Carnegie Centre – Libby Davies’ organizing base – which has gained a reputation for trampling the civil liberties of the homeless. In January, homeless man Bill Simpson was barred from the Carnegie Learning Centre, accused of blogging about political issues at Carnegie. He was found guilty of blogging by Board members and staff during a ’star chambers’ hearing to which he was not invited.

Although Simpson’s case was the most publicized, there have been other cases of disrespect for the civil liberties of low income people at Carnegie. Staff in the Carnegie Action Project office at Carnegie called security guards on a Carnegie volunteer, Frank, and had him escorted from the premises, after he stopped by to tell Carnegie Board member Bob Sarti that it was wrong to bar Simpson for freedom of expression.

During the hunt for bloggers at Carnegie, a volunteer at Carnegie revealed that he had been questioned by Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty and Learning Centre Co-ordinator Lucy Alderson about a low income person under suspicion of blogging about Carnegie politics.

Even the Vancouver Network of Drug Users, which had a representative sit on the same panel as Carnegie at the “Civil City Slam”, had once had a lawyer threaten to take legal action against Carnegie for violating the civil liberties of marginalized people.

Sara Kendall: “racialized youth”, “neo-liberal agenda”, and other buzz words

Sara Kendall, tall, slim, with super short brown hair, a youth worker with the Vancouver Network of Drug Users – one of the groups that pushed for North America’s first Supervised Injection Site just two blocks west of First United church – also spoke on the panel at the “Slam”. But it was difficult to hear her message through her buzz words and phrases — “racialized youth”, “neo-Liberal agenda” “queer youth”, “culture of violence”. She even spoke of people “reaching out to another person from their place of need” — in plain English, that’s panhandling.

Kendall did manage to explain a form of street clearing that youth are being subjected to by police: “relocation”. That’s when police pick up a young person on the streets and drive them to another neighborhood and dump them.

Kendall identified government “cuts to public services” as part of the problem. She had worked for the City until the last election when the left wing Council lost power and the newly elected Mayor Sullivan axed her job.

Michael Vonn: “Olympics are a downhill event”

Michael Vonn – that’s a woman – Policy Director at the B.C. Civil Liberties Association also sat on the panel and told the crowd that from a civil liberties perspective, the “Olympics are a down hill event.” Vonn, in her late 30’s, slim, with shoulder length curly brown hair, announced that a stated goal of Project Civil City during Olympic preparations is to address “quality of life crimes.” “Oh please!”, she added. What the Mayor’s Civil City initiative really comes down to is “street sweeping the poor”, Vonn said.

A stated goal of Civil City is to “reduce aggressive panhandling by 50%” but, Vonn says, “we have no idea what the current base rate of aggressive panhandling is.” The same goes for homelessness and drug peddling which the goal of Civil City is to reduce by 50%. “The evidence doesn’t matter,” she told the crowd.

It’s people’s “perception of being at risk” that matters, Vonn explained. Police could potentially “charge someone for being the object of someone else’s fears.”

Apparently eager to assure the crowd that she was one of them, Vonn quipped, “Blue is not a good color on me.”

Dag Walker: “There are no consequences.”

Blue is a good color on Dag Walker who, like other members of the Vancouver Chapter of the Blue Revolution, wears a blue scarf to his meetings. Every Thursday evening Walker, in his early fifties, walks downtown to the Vancouver Public Library where their meetings are held and sees the public disorder on the streets.

Walker does agree with some issues raised at the “Civil City Slam”, like the fact that giving police power to directly lay charges is a “slippery slope”. But he also believes that leftists in Vancouver tend to downplay how serious the problem of public disorder is. “It’s out of control,” he says. People are fed up with the panhandlers who hound them day after day in coffee shops and on the streets, panhandlers whose “place of need” is, in his view, more often than not a crack addiction.

“When I was at London Drugs a few weeks ago”, he says, “somebody had shit on the sidewalk.” He actually saw it happen; a woman whom he suspects was on drugs defecated in broad daylight as pedestrians walked around her. And he points out that some streets smell like urine, “People piss everywhere.” He doesn’t share the left’s view that social conditions cause this public disorder. He attributes it to the fact that, “There are no consequences.”

Former Attorney General appointed to new position of Civil City Commissioner to tackle public disorder
It may not be a coincidence that the left held their Civil City Slam just a week after former B.C. Attorney General, Geoff Plant, was appointed to the newly created position of Civil City Commissioner in Vancouver. Plant’s appointment was seen as a coup for Mayor Sullivan but a set back for Vancouverites on the left arguing that more money for the social safety net is a solution to street disorder, not “criminalizing poverty”.

Plant’s appointment, lawyer David Eby told the crowd at the Slam, signals that Project Civil City will emphasize a “law and order” approach. But at the press conference announcing his appointment a week earlier, Plant hinted at a multi-pronged approach, “I am committed to tackling the underlying root causes of Vancouver’s challenges, while also dealing with some of the more straightforward, public disorder issues that we are experiencing.”

Garrett: the mechanic who tried to save Chris Poeung

Remember Garrett, the mechanic who went over to help 13 yr. old Chris Poeung after he got stabbed? Garrett Gustafson used his bare hands to apply pressure to the wound near Chris’ heart and kept the pressure on for at least ten minutes, until the paramedics arrived. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to save Chris.

I saw Garrett, a short, young looking 43 yr. old with green-brown eyes and light brown hair, this evening when I dropped into McDonalds at Terminal and Main for a coffee. Garrett was having a snack and a coffee before he did some mechanical work on a van in the parking lot that belongs to Tom, another guy who drops in regularly for coffee.

Garrett is a third generation mechanic. Both his father and his maternal grandfather were mechanics. He learned the trade in high school in Winnipeg.

Garrett told me that reporters from The Province newspaper had tracked him down today. I knew they were looking for him because a reporter had e-mailed me trying to locate him. She said she had seen Garrett's name on my blog posting about the Chris Poeung stabbing in the parking lot next door to McDonalds. I had revealed on the blog that Garrett worked at a local car repair shop, but I didn't mention the name. I didn't know the name. Province reporters went to garage after garage in the neighbourhood until they found him at "Nic's" over near Cambie. (Nic's stands for "Non-intimidating Car Service".) Garrett agreed to meet with a Province reporter at McDonald’s after work.

The Province reporter had asked Garrett if he would meet in the parking lot where flowers now lie on the spot where Chris lay bleeding. Garrett looked at me, shaking his head and grimacing, indicating that he had not wanted to go over there.

"Did The Province take a photograph of you?", I asked Garrett. "About a hundred", he responded. When the photos were being taken, he said, "I held my McDonald’s coffee cup in front of me the whole time". Maybe McDonalds will return the favor by giving me free coffee, he said, grinning.

I told Garrett that the Province reporter had called him “heroic” in her e-mail to me. He didn't respond much to that. But Ric, a crusty 75 year old who regularly drops into McDonalds for coffee and has a teenager son of his own, had earlier weighed in on this: “The kid died; Garrett would have been a hero if the kid had lived”. But then again Ric was still peeved with Garrett for being too tired last night to help him fix his car.

Don, who has had coffee with Garrett at McDonalds and sold him a mountain bike he no longer used, believes that what Garrett did was indeed heroic: "He helped save that kid long enough for the doctors to get to him. I bet we'll see him up for some kind of medal."

I had not run into Garrett since last Saturday when I saw him applying pressure to stem the flow of blood from Chris Poeung's chest in the parking lot. Garrett told me when I chatted with him this evening, that he had said a prayer for Chris as he pressed on his wound, but not out loud. He had said the prayer for Chris after seeing "a woman saying a prayer over him", out loud in Spanish. “Is that what that woman was doing?,” I asked. I had mentioned that woman on my blog; I had reported seeing her kneeling by Chris' head, one hand on each side of his head, talking to him "softly, continuously". She had dark hair. I didn’t realize at the time that she was saying a prayer. I didn’t even realize that she was speaking Spanish as I didn’t listen too closely.

Garrett has no children. But he says he would definitely like to have some.

Garrett, who grew up on Ukranian food in a family of six children in Winnipeg, was asked by The Province if he had a message for Chris Poeung’s parents. The only thing I could say, he told me, his face and voice turning sad, was “God Bless, I’m sorry for your loss.” And knowing Garrett, he meant it. "I was traumatized when my father died when I was eight," he told me. His father died of a brain tumor six months after a machine that he was using to drill through ice flew up and hit him on the head. As an adult, when Garrett got a call from his mother in Winnipeg saying she wasn't feeling well, he said, “I’m coming to see you." He got on a bus. She died a week and a half later. "I just loved her so much," he says.

When Chris was taken away in the ambulance, Garrett says, "I thought he had a 60-40 chance." "A 40% chance to live?", I asked. "A 60% chance", Garrett responded. I was surprised that he had been that optimistic. Earlier, when I had mentioned that in the parking lot I was afraid that Chris had died when, for a few moments, his entire body went absolutely still -- something I don't think I will ever forgot -- Garrett raised his eyebrows slightly and nodded, saying softly, "I saw that too." I felt relieved to hear him say that. I don't know why, but I needed to know that I wasn't the only one who had witnessed those few moments.

The thing that haunts me about seeing Chris Poeung lying in that parking lot is whether anything more could have done more to help him survive. There were so many people around Chris – several of us being adults -- but none of us, other than Garrett, seemed to know first aid. Don told me the other night that the first aid course Garrett, whose paternal grandfather was a general practitioner, had taken was probably one of those short ones that last a day, minus lunch and smoke breaks.

That’s exactly what Garrett had taken. He told me he had taken his first aid course at the Newton Advocacy Group Society. “It was an 8 hr. course, very extensive”, he said, “Class 3”. The Newton Advocacy Group, Garrett explained, is a government funded organization that gives free first aid courses and helps women find employment. "And they help homeless people get back on their feet", Garrett said. "And that's me." Garrett became homeless when the boat squatters in False Creek got evicted. But he has an apartment in Surrey now and comes in to work on the Sky Train, his bike in tow.

I mentioned to Don the other night that I had been puzzled by the fact that Chris had a gaping cut, about ¾” long and fairly deep, on the base of his chin – it could have been a stab wound -- but it wasn’t bleeding. The absence of bleeding could have been a sign, Don thought, that not enough blood was flowing upwards to his head. He would have elevated Chris’ feet, he said, to get blood flowing away from his feet and legs and towards the more vital areas of his body like his head. I could have put my pack sack under his feet, I thought.

Don also told me that it’s important to keep an injured person warm when they’re going into shock, and it sounded to him like Chris had been going into shock, as they can start getting hypothermia. When I told Garrett about Don’s suggestion, he responded, “It was warm out that day.” Garrett was right; it had been a sunny day. But Chris was lying on the pavement in the parking lot and I wish now that I had put my thick sweater over him, at least over the side of his chest that Garrett wasn't applying pressure to. “He was lying on that cold pavement for at least 10 minutes,” I reminded Garrett.

Mentioning the length of time Chris had been lying in the parking lot, prompted me to add that the paramedics seemed to take longer than usual to get there. “Yeah,” Garrett said solemnly. “It seemed like it took them at least 10 minutes to get there, maybe 12 minutes”, I said. Garrett shook his head in agreement. First the Fire Department paramedics had arrived and, about five minutes later, the ambulance. “I’ve seen ambulances called for junkies on the street that seem to arrive much faster”, I said. Garrett, who lived for some time in this neighbourhood, again shook his head in agreement. We didn’t criticize the paramedics though; we don’t know exactly what they were up against, except that they were traveling in a Saturday rush hour on a holiday long weekend. But anybody who has lived for years on the Downtown Eastside gets accustomed to seeing ambulances called and gets a sense of the usual response time.

Barry Miller, a pensioner who had been walking next to me on the sidewalk when the stabbing occurred, says he saw the ambulance initially stop at the opposite side of the parking lot where other, less seriously injured, teenagers were standing. “That ambulance went to the far corner of the parking lot first," he said. "I saw it stop where some of the other kids were; there were four kids stabbed, you know.”

After talking to The Province, Garrett was second guessing himself about one thing he had said. When the reporter asked him what he thought the boy accused of stabbing Chris should be charged with, Garrett responded, “Murder.” “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that”, he told me. He thought about it for a short time, though, and added, “But I was being honest”.

I told Garrett that Don also believes that second degree murder is the right charge. When I mentioned to Don that Chris had a deep open wound on his chin that looked like it had come from a knife, he had responded with surprise, “That kid was stabbed more than once? If you stab somebody more than once, it means you’re trying to kill them. And if you stab them in the chin, it means you were probably going for their throat.” On the other hand, people who know the accused boy say he was trying to defend himself in a situation in which he felt outnumbered and did not set out to kill anyone.

“So, do you think you’ll buy a Province paper tomorrow?", Garrett asked me. I'll probably just grab one of the free ones lying around in McDonalds when I drop in for coffee, I told him. I'll show it to Don if I see him.

I agree with Don's conclusion about what Garrett achieved with his first aid intervention on Chris Poeung: "He kept that kid alive long enough for his family to see him before he died."

[Update: The interview with Garrett wasn't in Friday's Province, although the reporter had told him that it would run Friday. "I guess they missed the deadline," Garrett said. Don, who worked as a journalist years back, believes The Province will still run that story: "They went to alot of expense to find Garrett. Those were well paid reporters they had out there looking for him."]

Another Story in the Naked City

A woman walked down the winding stairs at Carnegie Community Centre, from the third floor to the lobby and out the front door. She was naked.

There were scores of witnesses at Carnegie on this busy Saturday evening at around 9 p.m. It was cold that night, just as it was for much of this 3-day holiday weekend as Vancouverites celebrated the Queen's birthday.

A regular Carnegie volunteer who didn’t want his name published, told me that he was in the lobby when he saw the woman come down the stairs. “She had a nice tan,” he said “except for her bum; her bum was white.” She walked west on the 100 block Hastings Street. “You could see this white bum walking down Hastings”, he said, chuckling. “She was walking calmly, not hurrying at all.”

About 1 ½ minutes later, Dean, a musician who drops into the Carnegie Music Program, came down the winding staircase to the Carnegie lobby with the woman’s clothes in his arms. “Where did that woman go?”, the witness recalled Dean saying. “Here’s her clothes.” Then Dean’s girlfriend showed up. The Queen was not amused.

Dean was just trying to help the naked woman, the witness said. He left her clothes at the reception desk in the lobby and took off down the street with her coat, looking for her.

"People in cars going by were honking their horns. Guys were whistling. Girls were going, ‘Ahhh, look at that.’”

The police came back to Carnegie to get the woman’s clothes. The witness said that, according to Dean, “She ended up at St. Paul’s [hospital].”

Because the witness didn’t want his name used, I asked Bill Simpson, who goes to Carnegie daily, if he knew of this incident. “Dean saw the whole thing”, Simpson said. The woman reportedly had a "break down" and took her clothes off by a window on the 3^rd floor," Simpson told me. “She’s in St. Paul’s.”

There are a million stories in the naked city. You have just read one.

Boy, 14, to be charged with 2nd degree homicide in death of 13 yr. old

The Vancouver teen accused of fatally stabbing Chris Poeung will be charged with second degree homicide, VPD Constable Tim Fanning told reporters today, not manslaughter as originally anticipated.

"The new charge means the prosecution will allege the youngster used a weapon that he should have known could cause death", the Globe and Mail reported.

The accused 14 year old will remain in jail until his appearance in provincial youth court on Tuesday.

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.
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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."