The shooting to death of Leon McCurdy on Wednesday by the owner of a Paradise, East Coast Demerara home which McCurdy and two accomplices had invaded has evoked a range of public reactions. Some of those views have been embodied in discussions which have to do with whether the encounter between the home owner and the 15-year-old boy bandit might not have ended without loss of life. That is an altogether understandable sentiment. After all, only the churlish would relish the thought of a 15-year-old who ought to have been in school last Wednesday, possibly preparing for a tilt at the CXC examinations in June, being shot and breathing his last on premises which he had gone to rob along with two accomplices.
Those who have no tears for young McCurdy say, mostly, that they have become numbed by the proliferation of teenage gangsters who demonstrate high levels of both proficiency and ruthlessness and who appear entirely unfazed by the risks that attend their pursuits.
In the case of young McCurdy it would appear that he may have had earlier brushes with deviant, even criminal behaviour. As far as we are told too, he might have come from a dysfunctional home, though a difficult background is of course no justification for embracing crime at an early age. There are those, on the other hand, who argue that compelling peer pressure coupled with the deficiencies in parental direction are probably among the primary reasons for the proliferation of child bandits in our society.
Whatever the reasons, incidents like the loss of the life of a 15-year-old during the commission of an armed robbery, provide reason for considerable regret, if only because it is a reflection of the unwholesome direction in which our society appears to be headed at breakneck speed.
Youngsters like Leon McCurdy are frequently incubated in dysfunctional homes and neighbourhoods where, all too frequently, the available examples are the unpalatable ones. Increasingly, the school system ‒ with its own chronic resource weaknesses – must assume the formidable challenge of trying to redirect feet that have already been set on the wrong path. It is a task for which our schools are patently underprepared.
And if one shudders to think that the school system might have lost the battle, there are certainly cases in which deviant youngsters appear to have succeeded in imposing their will on thoroughly intimidated teachers who openly concede their withdrawal from those responsibilities that have to do with reprimanding, far less, disciplining delinquent children, out of concern for their own physical safety. That having been said, it is the school, along with the home, that are the critical institutions for shaping character and where those, for one reason or another, fail in that mission (and there is irrefutable evidence of considerable failure) then we are will almost certainly have more stories like the short, tragic one of Leon McCurdy.
This is perhaps as appropriate a juncture as any to return to the theme of creating a binding contract between the school and the home, (a theme which this newspaper has previously raised), one which commits the home to delivering children who are discipline oriented and are amenable to being afforded an education. Conversely, the school has a responsibility to deliver that education. If we can do so and if we can keep our children in school we might yet be able to spare ourselves the boy bandits that are materializing from the woodwork, so to speak.
Instances like the killing of Leon McCurdy are really national tragedies in so far as they are a reflection of serious societal flaws that will take a considerable amount of time, effort and societal and political will to repair. In much the same way that there has been a sharp and sustained decline in critical standards that have to do with the quality of the home and the school, so too, there is an absence of any real safety net, any viable options to the idleness and its consequences that can derive from a lack of opportunity or of an absence of constructive activity. And if only because we may well not learn from the tragedy of a young life lost in pursuit of a directionless existence we will probably have to deal with other similarly tragic stories not too far down the road.