They ride the same bus to Wilbur Cross High School in the mornings. One night, they met up on this corner in a middle-class stretch of town. One of the students had a gun. He brandished it and said: “Give us everything.”
The mugging took place at the corner of West Elm Street and McKinley Avenue, just one more mugging in a city all too familiar with gun-related crime. But it has startled and unnerved lower Westville because of the age of both the perpetrators and victims, and because the crime occurred in a safe neighborhood where parents feel comfortable allowing teens to walk alone at night. Block watches are active. Homes near this corner, like the one in the photo (which used to belong to the late Mayor Richard C. Lee) list for as much as half a million dollars.
Thanks to some luck and fast-responding cops, the encounter also ended with the arrests of a group of 14- and 15-year-olds who already had criminal pasts.
“Ron” (not his real name) discussed the episode Monday sitting in his family’s living room not far from the mugging. Speaking almost with a shrug, he seemed unruffled by the episode. The details he offered, too, offered a somewhat calmer version of events than a description contained in an e‑mail distributed by a neighborhood block watch.
Ron is 16, a junior in the honors program at Wilbur Cross. He was walking up West Elm Street with two neighborhood pals, also 16, around 10:15 last Friday night. They headed toward Forest Road to see another friend.
At the corner of Marvel they encountered three other boys. They didn’t think much of it.
A block up, at the corner of Alden, the other three boys “started stomping and tried to scare us,” Ron said. Ron’s friends kept walking.
A block further, at McKinley, the three other boys caught up with them again. That’s when one of the boys pulled out an automatic handgun. “Don’t try anything,” Ron remembered him saying. “Give us everything.”
At first Ron didn’t recognize the muggers. Then he noticed that the boy with the gun rides the same school bus Ron rides to Cross in the morning. The boy grabs the bus a mile or so east, in the Edgewood neighborhood. The two don’t know each other, Ron said.
The muggers patted down the three Westville teens. They took Ron’s cell phone and wallet. They took another cell phone, an iPod and two wallets from the others.
“Walk away and don’t try anything,” one of the muggers said. Then the three assailants reversed course and returned walking east on West Elm.
Ron and his friend resumed walking toward Forest Road. Once the muggers were out of sight, they noticed that one of their friends still had a cellphone. It was inside a puffy jacket, where it had eluded the pat-down. So the kids called 911.
It just so happened that a squad of undercover narcotics cops was in the neighborhood on unrelated business. They heard the report on the radio and immediately found the fleeing muggers in the street. The teens ran into backyards between Central Avenue and West Rock Avenue. The cops caught up with them and made the arrests, with no resistance.
The cops also recovered the gun. According to a cop at the scene, the gun was loaded; a bullet was in the chamber. All three kids had prior records, he said; the gun had been reported stolen in a prior burglary, and the boy allegedly holding the gun had been previously arrested on a gun-related charge. The three suspects — two of them 15, one 14 — went to the juvenile detention center on Whalley.
Ron and his friends ended up at the police station offering statements and identifying the weapon. They were home by midnight. Ron and his parents praised both the quick response and the sensitivity of the cops.
Three days later, Ron’s parents, understandably, seemed more shaken than he did, although they continue to describe lower Westville as safe.
“I still want to feel my son can walk alone in the neighborhood,” Ron’s father said.
“Somebody asked me: ‘So, are you going to move?’ It was the last thing to cross my mind,” said his mom.
Ron said he doesn’t feel reluctant to walk around at night, either, though he does have new travel plans in mind. “I’m getting my license soon,” he said.