Riot In Detention

During our escapes we never made it very far or for very long. A couple of times we managed a few days, surviving by stealing and sometimes coming close to hypothermia from being under dressed for the weather. Once we slept in a public washroom in Bowering Park, burning paper and garbage trying to keep warm. The next morning, we followed the railway tracks into Mount Pearl, and I believe it was during this trip that we broke into a school. I guess the name of the school doesn’t matter after all these years, but I won’t include it regardless of that. We broke in through a window and began searching the building for money. The principal’s office had nothing. The vice principal’s office though was a goldmine. There was no money, but the desk drawer held a slew a liquor bottles. There was a bottle of champagne, a bottle of screech, and two or three other bottles of varying levels of fullness. I was ecstatic! We had booze!

Prior to the school break & enter (the name of which I just deleted from this (Nothing to be gained by that) we had broken into a house. We noticed that there was a note on the front door and went closer to investigate. It was a message to the phone company or some repair man to inform them that they, the home owners, would be returning around 3:00. Want your home broken into? Just leave a note like that one.

We had no idea what time it was, but figured we had lots of time and thanks to the note, there was no doubt that we would have the place to ourselves.

We broke in through a small basement window on which I managed to cut myself on when I crawled though. My hand was dripping blood that I tried to keep from falling onto anything, sucking on it as we walked upstairs to the main floor. We began searching for money, with me heading for the kitchen figuring I would find something to drink. Getting drunk would be very welcome.

We were so preoccupied with our efforts that we didn’t hear the front door being unlocked. We did hear someone coming in though, and froze where we were, in the kitchen, as a woman walked in.

We tried to remain calm, explaining to the woman that were had come to the house looking for “Jimmy” and that the front door had been wide open when we arrived just a minute or two before she arrived. She was a very good actress and was not at all intimidated by these two boys in her house. She actually had us thinking (hoping and praying) that she was actually buying our story. She asked if we went to school with “Jimmy”. We said yes, we did. I couldn’t believe it – we might actually get away with this! We were talking our way out of it!

My heart sank as she said that she was going to call the police just to make sure we were telling the truth, and that we should sit down while she called.

We agreed, sitting down on kitchen chairs as she picked up the phone. She started to dial and we bolted for the door.

Jim was ahead of me and he fumbled with the lock on the door knob just long enough for her to catch up with me. She grabbed my coat as I was going through the door, screaming at me to stop. I raised my fist, put my other hand on her shoulder and said “Let go bitch!” trying to scare her into letting go of me, but she wasn’t that easily scared. She still clung to my coat with both hands. I simply turned and started running, dragging her along behind me. My coat ripped along the seam, up one side and all the way down the sleeve to the cuff and as it did she finally let go, still yelling at us.

Security in the detention center had been improved, and I once escaped by running away when I was taken to the hospital with a suspected broken hand: I had repeated punched a brick wall until my hand swelled to he point that it looked broken. When the staff took me to the hospital I simply looked at them, said “See ya!” and ran from them.

The last time we escaped things got way out of control, not working out the way we had intended at all.

There were three of us involved and we started it all off by refusing to go into our cells at lock-up time. The staff decided, as we knew they would, to take us one at a time and physically put us in our cells. They grabbed Jim first, three of them trying to pin him to the floor while Jim fought them like a rabid wolf and screaming like a madman. While the staff fought with Jim, Mike, who was a big guy standing about six foot five, picked up the table and raised it up over his head.

“Let him go or I’ll drop it on you! Honest to fuck I will!” Mike roared, obviously having trouble not dropping the large table on them. The staff scrambled out of the way, Jim stood up, and Mike brought the table down with as much force as he could. The iron legs snapped off from the body of the table and we each grabbed one. Now we were armed.

Things quickly went from crazy to total madness. We made the staff back up to the end of the building and then began smashing our way into the control room. The glass (which we were told was bulletproof but did not believe it) turned out to be a lot tougher than we thought it would be. We struck it repeatedly until it would finally crack. Once it was cracked we smashed and pounded until we got through it and eventually we had control of the building.

It all happened very quickly, but to me if felt as if we were running around smashing everything in sight for an hour or more. I could not have been more than twenty minutes or so, but with adrenaline pumping and all the noise and excitement it felt like much longer.

There was only one staff member left in the control room, and she had managed to make a phone call before locking herself in the washroom. We beat a couple of holes in the door to make sure that she stayed there and then commenced to smash the control panel which controlled all of the doors in the building, totally unaware that there were now thirteen cops outside the front door trying to get in. There was no need to destroy the control panel, and it was actually a very stupid move on our part, as doors around the building began locking and unlocking and we could have simply left it alone and had full control of the system. In our frenzied state this never occurred to us. We just kept smashing everything.

We went out into the hallway where there were lockers filled with the inmates clothing. That is when we say the cops, beating on the door yelling at us to let them in. Of all the doors that were locking and unlocking throughout the building, the front door remained closed and locked. We laughed at them, each of us giving them the finger, threw on some clothes and headed back to the control room. It says something about the design of the building – it was easier to get out of it then to get in.

Buy this time we had no fear of the staff trying to confront us. They had made it clear that they had no intention of coming near us at this point. We headed out a fire escape door at the far end of the building, the same door I had used on my very first escape. We climbed over the fence and began running as if hell itself was chasing us.

It was January, there was a lot of snow down, and this was the “White Hills.” Running through the deep snow that was up to my waist was no easy task. Behind us I saw a line of flashlights bobbing up and down in the dark, and I knew there was no escaping that many cops, but I ran and ran for what felt like forever, through snow drift after snow drift, heading towards the city. If we could just make it to the houses, we may be able to lose ourselves.

The snow was too much for me. I was simply exhausted. I literally passed out and lay there in the snow.

I woke with a cop crawling up to me, looking much like I felt. He grabbed me and punched me weakly in the stomach a few times before dragging me up to the road where we both laid for some time retching and vomiting. It was obvious he was as exhausted as I was.

Then it was into a cruiser and downtown to the St. John’s City Lockup. There would be no returning to the youth system after this.