On Monday, someone posted images on social media of a teen who was said to be attempting to steal a vehicle when the owner caught and beat the boy. He was left without pants lying on a snowy sidewalk. Police have said they will recommend charging the person accused of beating the boy. Many people believe something worst could be on the horizon.
Last year, the city of Milwaukee saw more than 7,000 car thefts, about an 11 percent increase over the previous year, and there are no real signs of things slowing down. Melody Williams lives on Milwaukee’s north side and says people are fed up. She says because people are so angry about the car thefts, she wasn’t surprised when she saw images floating around Facebook of the young man who was caught.
“It wasn’t a surprised to me. I figured sooner or later it was going to happen. I felt maybe something worse than just him laid out unconscious. Somebody was going to rebel because people work hard, work hard for their things and to have someone just come up and try to take it away from you, it was bound to happen, for someone to lash out,” Williams says.
Williams says she has a 17 year old son who has a vehicle and she always warns him to be aware.
“He likes to go out to ballgames, to games for his school or he goes to practice or he’s out getting gas. I just tell him he has to be careful because we got young people out here that just don’t care that will steal and take it away from him,” Williams says.
All over social media debates are taking place about whether the kid in question who was beaten and left without pants deserved to be attacked. Some have said he got what he had coming, while others, including his mother who spoke to channel 12 said he did not deserve to be beaten.
“He was wrong for touching somebody else’s stuff, but that gives nobody the right to leave someone’s child out in the freezing snow with no clothes on left for dead.”
As far as fellow mom Melody Williams is concerned, she’s on the fence but says there is one thing she knows for sure…
“The laws need to change as far as the juvenile justice system. These kids need to be held accountable for what they’re doing and not wait until someone get killed or bodily harm is done before they actually lock them up,” Williams says.
And people are dying. Just last month Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett held a press conference after a 16-year-old boy died in a crash involving a stolen vehicle.
“This is not a game. This is not a game at all. You may play video games, you might like having fun, but I can tell you there’s a lot of young people who have lost a lot of friends and have made a lot of makeshift memorials for friends of theirs who were involved in stolen vehicle accidents,” Barrett says.
Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn has said that many of these car thefts are being committed by young people with immature brains who think this is a game of Grand Theft Auto.
