The ones most victimized by gangs in Prince George are the people on the streets, said a social advocate who had to pay the ultimate price.
Bob Sandbach runs Crooked Path, a youth program that gives street-involved kids a chance at living a productive life, teaches life skills, and brings these at-risk youth to the great outdoors. He is the father of Celynn Cadieux, a highly addicted girl who was abused sexually and physically by judge David Ramsay. She led the handful of girls who successfully prosecuted the provincial court judge, but died of drug-related reactions not long after.
He hopes that the Community Solutions-Gang Crime Summit being held at The Ramada today and Tuesday keeps the focus on the real people involved the deepest, because they are the ones who pay the biggest bills due to drug addition and do the dirtiest subcontracting (sex, violence, break-and-enter, auto theft, etc.) due to debts owed.
"I'd like to hear a doctor tell me that when my daughter was going through all she was going through, that she was capable of thinking straight. I'd love some doctor to look me in the eye and tell me that," said Sandbach. He advocates an amendment to the mental health regulations that would allow those in the throes of addiction to be incarcerated in a medical facility under the care of detoxification and rehabilitation specialists.
"With Celine at Edgewood (a drug treatment facility in Nanaimo), she didn't start thinking straight until a couple of months had gone by," he said. "It was about 60 days before she was my daughter again, and at 90 days she was finally in a mental state where she was happy to be there getting clean. Positive things were coming out of her, she was looking forward again."
But even that was not enough time, he said. During a short home visit before she was set to start a continuation at Edgewood, she met up with someone emotionally close but heavily addicted, and a few hours later they had used both cocaine and heroin together. Cadieux, 22, fell violently ill as a result and died within 48 hours.
Sandbach explained that his daughter was eight years old the first time she smoked crack cocaine, and was using needles to shoot drugs into her body by the age of 11 or 12. Yet she was able to clean up enough to articulate the charges against Ramsay, was in the process of charging another suspect in a position of high trust, and was forming a productive life around herself. Those caught up deeply in the life of drugs - a world dominated by organized crime - can absolutely be restored in mind and body, said Sandbach, and that is one of the key ways to take back your community from gangs.
The Community Solutions-Gang Crime Summit is sold out. The list of speakers today includes former gang member James Coulter, provincial gang task force police spokesman Sgt. Shinder Kirk, academic gang expert Dr. Mark Totten, and attorney general Mike de Jong.
