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COUNCIL SACK THREAT LONG MEMORIES Cardinia avoids code red Vietnam vet remembered PAGE 5 Wednesday, 17 August 2016
PAGE 20
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A new take on some old Grease KOOWEERUP Secondary College is geared up to perform its modern interpretation of Grease the Musical next week. With striking, colourful costumes - with the help of volunteer mums - and dances choreographed by students themselves, Grease is set to be a fun show for the whole family featuring all of the favourite songs from the 1970s movie starring John Travolta. Grease will be performed across three nights, beginning with a matinee on Thursday 25 August. See the full story and more photos on page 28.
■ Heart-broken Pakenham mum faces facts on teen son’s slide into crime ...
‘He belongs in jail’ By Aneeka Simonis IT WAS only months ago her son was at school, played for a footy club and would happily look after his younger sisters. But now, the Pakenham mum says her 16-year-old son is completely unrecognisable - running away from home for days at a time while out on bail, breaking into people’s homes and stealing cars as part of his quest for “notoriety” among the young gang scene in the outer south-east. And all for no good reason. Tearfully, the mum of five admits she wants him locked up. “I feel powerless. I have called the police out of desperation. He needs to be stopped and I can’t stop him,” she said. But not for want of trying. She and her husband installed key locks to doors to try to keep the teen in, but he will just smash them
open and climb out - and is gone for days at a time. He was described by his mum as a “scrawny white kid”, who has been “pushed into doing a lot of things” by his car-thieving gangster mates, or g’s as they refer to themselves, to gain his “badge of honour“. At 16, he’s gone from being the guy who runs into the house after it’s been kicked in to driving the getaway car, all while not having his learner’s permit. And by all reports, he’s proud of it. “When I ask him, sometimes he replies ‘No comment’. Other times, he brags about it,” his mum said, noting her only interactions with him were via Facebook. His mum is a nurse. She’s taken up nightshift work because she can no longer sleep knowing her son has escaped out into the night and is driving fast cars in bad company. On one of his recent benders, she
hacked into his Facebook account and discovered he’d been knocked unconscious in a crash in a stolen car. “He was telling his friends he had a sore neck and headache. I thought he could have a bleed on the brain. I kept trying to call but he wouldn’t pick up. I was worried he’d go to sleep and never wake up,” she said. Her son is today a stark contrast to the loving, family-oriented boy she knew as recently as April. “He was very sensitive. He was very close to me and his sisters. He cared about your feelings. He was like the girls’ second mum. The other day, my husband said to him, ‘You need to stop this. I can’t keep seeing your mum like this,’ crying and upset. But he just laughed. That’s not him,” she said. Her family’s torment all began after the Moomba Festival riots. His mum only discovered her son
was at the festival when a police officer came knocking with a search warrant. Her son was charged with robbery - and since then, police have searched their home a further two times.During her own searches, the teen’s mum has found multiple wads of hundred dollar notes, four sets of car keys, two pairs of gloves, iPods, iPads and phones. There have been multiple occasions she’s been contacted by friends who observed her son driving through Pakenham in different cars. “Cash for lifts” is now a big phenomenon fuelling the car theft craze. “It’s like teenage Uber. They ask, ‘Have you got a hottie?’ which is a stolen car, then offer cash for a lift somewhere,” she explained. The Pakenham teen has dropped out of school and no longer plays for his local footy club.
Instead, he sleeps all day and does whatever else all night despite having strict curfew conditions as part of his bail. “He says, ‘Why should I stay? They never check on me.’ I’ve told police to keep him. I told them, ‘If he gets out, he’ll do the same thing tomorrow.’ But they tell me they don’t have enough room,” his mum said. If her son’s same story had been told to her six months ago, the Pakenham mum said she would be critical of the parents, placing blame on them for letting their child run wild. But no amount of love, or tough love, had stopped her son. “We are a normal family. We have two parents that work. This has affected our whole lives. It’s a nightmare that won’t stop,” she said. The teen is expected to front court over a series of charges in the next few days.
Kylie accused in court PAGE 5