| “Gone are those days when children used to be considered angels.” That was the opinion of a newspaper vendor, who almost lost her entire day’s earnings to an apparently desperate 10-year-old boy.Ethelene Cummings has been selling newspapers in proximity to the 1763 Monument for the past 10 years and was never robbed until yesterday. Luckily the cash was returned to her by public-spirited young men who pursued the boy and caught him. He was later taken into police custody.The boy being returned to the crime scene.Yesterday, when Kaieteur News visited Cummings at her vending spot, she was still shaken and shocked that a child, who got her involved in a “sweet gaffing”, had tried to rob her.She explained that she was selling papers and a little after 12:00hrs yesterday, the 10-year-old approached her and was walking around her paper stand.“He come looking around and I ask him what he want, and he ask me to change $500 for him, and then he ask me if I got change to change it…So I say yes and I take my money out from under the papers and I change it for him.”The woman said that she continued doing her business as per normal, but the child was not moving, “I turned around and I asked him if he was waiting on somebody and he said he was waiting on his small brother, and that he left him home bathing.”According to Cummings, thieving was the last thing on her mind because ‘he is a little boy’ and she was never robbed before.“I asked him where he was going and he said Sophia. So I then asked him if he is going by his grandmother and he told me that he was going by his mother. I asked him if he was not living with his mother and he said that his mother is living at an upstairs house and his five-year-old brother does run in the house and the people downstairs does complain, so they living with their aunty and uncle,” the vendor related.Cummings said when she asked the boy where he was living, he pointed towards Hadfield Street, Georgetown.“I ask him which school he going to and he told me Queen’s College. When he tell me that, I look at him again, and then I ask him how much marks he get at Common Entrance and he said they went for 500 and he get 499. I had to look at him again,” Cummings noted.“Although I know he was lying, I didn’t think he would have tried to thief from me because nuff children does come around here, and when I look at him, all I was seeing was a li’l child.”Cummings said that while she was talking to the boy, she was selling papers and had money in her hand all the time.“I decided to put my money between the papers and take a seat. He was sitting where I does normally sit, so I asked him to move. He got up, walk around, grab the money and run.”She said that she threw her water bottle at him and “a few guys around the corner ran behind him”.A taxi driver actually jam him (with his car) but he fell to the ground, got up, and ran west along Hadfield Street then south into Haley Street.“He run through a yard with no gate and I tell them guys that he going to run and getaway on D’urban Street. So I run around and he run straight in our hands and he didn’t had the money with him – he throw the money in a corner in the bushes, so we had to go back for it,Cheap NFL Jerseys Free Shipping,” the vendor related.The vendor yesterday showing where she put her money.According to an eyewitness, when the police put the child in their pick-up, two older boys rode behind the pickup and told the 10-year-old that his mother was calling him. The child then pointed to them and told the police that they were the ones who sent him to steal, but the lads rode away. |
