| HARMONY/DISCORD |
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| I had gotten home just before midnight (Saturday, Sept. 23/06) to my apartment in the Federal Building and was reading an email message about a Kitchener musician and two other people who had gotten killed in a five-car pile-up on the 401 late Thursday night, when I heard a loud crash right outside my fifth-floor window facing west on James St. N. Upon looking out the window, I saw a sports utility vehicle/van stopped parallel to a much smaller car, both of which were facing the Hamilton City Centre when they should have been facing either north or south. The driver of the SUV that caused the crash was a 16-year-old boy, and also in his mother�s car were five of his friends. Four of these young people took off and ran away immediately after the accident. The occupants of the smaller vehicle were a man, a woman, a three-year-old girl, a seven-year-old girl and a very small dog. It was not clear to me how the accident happened, but two other cars that had been parked in front of my building had also gotten their left rear bumpers clipped. Their owners were nowhere to be found. The only one potentially seriously injured in the crash was the seven-year-old girl who was carried away in the ambulance. I heard an officer state she was complaining of pain in her neck and back, and there may have been further damage caused by the shattered glass of the window next to where she had been sitting. As if this wasn�t horrific enough, I learned from two men (one from the neighbourhood business association) that there had just been a stabbing at one of the clubs barely more than a block north of me. Incredibly, this stabbing incident followed a second shooting in the area in the past month or so, the last one taking place only last night (Sept. 22)! I don�t even want to know what those incidents were about, but my sympathy goes out to all of the people who have been trying so hard to clean up what could be a very charming area in Hamilton. Although I miss my young sons terribly, sometimes I think I made the right decision in sending them to live with their father in a small, peaceful village in Newfoundland and Labrador four years ago. D.M. Wells |
| MORE VIOLENCE ON JAMES STREET NORTH (HAMILTON) |
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