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Should this "F'r" even be back on the street?......
even flow?
Posts: 8,066
Now I know that people are going to say that if he was on the drugs, yadda, yadda, yadda. Well I believe that if you need drugs to stabalize your mind. You are not right. You may appear right, but take those meds away and you become something that you may not want to live with and if that isn't bad enough you may become something society dosen't want to live with:
Thu, August 24, 2006
Living a nightmareAfter being stabbed numerous times, teenaged victim has to live with the nightmare that his attacker is back on his street
By MIKE STROBEL
Elsa Ferraro holds a yearbook containing a photograph of her son, Nicolas. The teen was stabbed by his neighbour, whom a judge has just released into the custody of his parents. Nicolas has left home. (Fred Thornhill, Sun)
Enter a nightmare on Graham Crescent.
Chapter II is a doozie. But first, put yourself in Chapter I:
You are 15, going on 16.
Quiet Saturday. You tinker with your mini-motorcycle in your garage in a leafy part of Markham.
Your two sisters are upstairs getting ready to visit grandma. Your mom, a paramedic, is sleeping off a night shift.
You glimpse a neighbour you barely know walking across the street.
You think he is coming to admire the tiny bike, which you bought with your part-time Toys 'R' Us wages.
You do not know he is hearing voices and carrying a black-handled fishing knife...
You are lucky. You can leave this nightmare.
Young Nicolas Lastoria cannot. He looks up again. This time he sees the knife. The neighbour says nothing, just yanks the boy up by his T-shirt.
AIR ESCAPING
"What are you doing?" Nicolas asks. Again and again and again and again, the knife plunges into him, so violently, the handle bends right over.
In shock, Nicolas finally fends off the man and staggers away. Not to the house, for fear of drawing danger to his mom and sisters, but up the street to a driveway full of cars.
Halfway there, he hears, feels, air escaping a hole in his side. A lung is burst. You know this if your mom is a paramedic.
He cannot breathe. For a minute, he cannot see.
Someone calls 911. York Regional Police ETF arrests Peter Galanos, 32, in the house across the street, where he lives with his parents.
Young Nicolas is in critical condition for two days at Sunnybrook.
He goes home just before he turns 16 on May 2.
NIGHTMARE ON GRAHAM CRESCENT II:
"They've let him go," a detective at the door tells Nicolas' mom Elsa Ferraro, 45, last week. "He's home."
Sure enough, there he is, across the street from a kid he knifed nearly to death barely three months before.
A shrink says he's okay so long as he takes his meds for paranoia-schizophrenia.
Last Monday a judge agrees and finds him "not criminally responsible" for the attack. And turns him loose.
A bewildered Nicolas, scars still red, paces his house for hours, peering across the street.
This is a good kid. "Life wouldn't be the same if Nicolas wasn't so generous," says his yearbook.
'ALMOST KILLED ME'
"How could they do this?" he asks his mom. "He almost killed me and he's back across the street already. How can I live like this?"
Next day she sends him to stay with his dad a while.
"I didn't know what to say to him," Elsa tells me.
"I had no answers."
She is still waiting for them.
She wants to see the Whitby psych report on Galanos.
She wants to know why she wasn't notified of the hearing last Monday. What about a victim-impact statement? Did the judge, the shrinks, know the attacker was a neighbour?
WHY THE HELL IS THIS GUY STILL ACROSS THE STREET?
Elsa sees awful things on her job, including one doomed, stabbed teen.
"You always think, 'when is it my family's turn?'
"Then it happens in my own garage.
"If my kids cannot feel safe in their own home, where can they feel safe?"
She stares across at the Galanos' tidy, two-storey.
"I'm a prisoner in my own house," she says.
So she locks all doors, draws all blinds by 7 p.m.
The judge's "not criminally responsible" verdict automatically sends the file to the Ontario Review Board.
The board can send Galanos to a psych hospital. Seems reasonable. The knifer can get help, his neighbours can sleep.
The case, York Crown Paul Tait assures me, "is not over."
Someone should tell Mr. Galanos.
He is not home when I visit Graham Cres., but I phone later.
As far as he's concerned the judge set him free and clear, so long as he stays on his meds and off his victims' property.
"It's over ... it's not even funny how finished it is."
You are right about that, Peter. "Not criminally responsible means not criminally responsible."
LEGAL BILLS
Right again.
He's a self-employed painter and insists he stays with his parents because of legal bills. The attack is clear in his mind, though he's not sure it was a real fishing knife.
"What happened, happened." He tells me he'd apologize to Nicolas and his family if he could only find the words.
Do you think justice has been done, Peter?
"I'm glad to be out, if that's what you're asking."
No, not exactly.
Thu, August 24, 2006
Living a nightmareAfter being stabbed numerous times, teenaged victim has to live with the nightmare that his attacker is back on his street
By MIKE STROBEL
Elsa Ferraro holds a yearbook containing a photograph of her son, Nicolas. The teen was stabbed by his neighbour, whom a judge has just released into the custody of his parents. Nicolas has left home. (Fred Thornhill, Sun)
Enter a nightmare on Graham Crescent.
Chapter II is a doozie. But first, put yourself in Chapter I:
You are 15, going on 16.
Quiet Saturday. You tinker with your mini-motorcycle in your garage in a leafy part of Markham.
Your two sisters are upstairs getting ready to visit grandma. Your mom, a paramedic, is sleeping off a night shift.
You glimpse a neighbour you barely know walking across the street.
You think he is coming to admire the tiny bike, which you bought with your part-time Toys 'R' Us wages.
You do not know he is hearing voices and carrying a black-handled fishing knife...
You are lucky. You can leave this nightmare.
Young Nicolas Lastoria cannot. He looks up again. This time he sees the knife. The neighbour says nothing, just yanks the boy up by his T-shirt.
AIR ESCAPING
"What are you doing?" Nicolas asks. Again and again and again and again, the knife plunges into him, so violently, the handle bends right over.
In shock, Nicolas finally fends off the man and staggers away. Not to the house, for fear of drawing danger to his mom and sisters, but up the street to a driveway full of cars.
Halfway there, he hears, feels, air escaping a hole in his side. A lung is burst. You know this if your mom is a paramedic.
He cannot breathe. For a minute, he cannot see.
Someone calls 911. York Regional Police ETF arrests Peter Galanos, 32, in the house across the street, where he lives with his parents.
Young Nicolas is in critical condition for two days at Sunnybrook.
He goes home just before he turns 16 on May 2.
NIGHTMARE ON GRAHAM CRESCENT II:
"They've let him go," a detective at the door tells Nicolas' mom Elsa Ferraro, 45, last week. "He's home."
Sure enough, there he is, across the street from a kid he knifed nearly to death barely three months before.
A shrink says he's okay so long as he takes his meds for paranoia-schizophrenia.
Last Monday a judge agrees and finds him "not criminally responsible" for the attack. And turns him loose.
A bewildered Nicolas, scars still red, paces his house for hours, peering across the street.
This is a good kid. "Life wouldn't be the same if Nicolas wasn't so generous," says his yearbook.
'ALMOST KILLED ME'
"How could they do this?" he asks his mom. "He almost killed me and he's back across the street already. How can I live like this?"
Next day she sends him to stay with his dad a while.
"I didn't know what to say to him," Elsa tells me.
"I had no answers."
She is still waiting for them.
She wants to see the Whitby psych report on Galanos.
She wants to know why she wasn't notified of the hearing last Monday. What about a victim-impact statement? Did the judge, the shrinks, know the attacker was a neighbour?
WHY THE HELL IS THIS GUY STILL ACROSS THE STREET?
Elsa sees awful things on her job, including one doomed, stabbed teen.
"You always think, 'when is it my family's turn?'
"Then it happens in my own garage.
"If my kids cannot feel safe in their own home, where can they feel safe?"
She stares across at the Galanos' tidy, two-storey.
"I'm a prisoner in my own house," she says.
So she locks all doors, draws all blinds by 7 p.m.
The judge's "not criminally responsible" verdict automatically sends the file to the Ontario Review Board.
The board can send Galanos to a psych hospital. Seems reasonable. The knifer can get help, his neighbours can sleep.
The case, York Crown Paul Tait assures me, "is not over."
Someone should tell Mr. Galanos.
He is not home when I visit Graham Cres., but I phone later.
As far as he's concerned the judge set him free and clear, so long as he stays on his meds and off his victims' property.
"It's over ... it's not even funny how finished it is."
You are right about that, Peter. "Not criminally responsible means not criminally responsible."
LEGAL BILLS
Right again.
He's a self-employed painter and insists he stays with his parents because of legal bills. The attack is clear in his mind, though he's not sure it was a real fishing knife.
"What happened, happened." He tells me he'd apologize to Nicolas and his family if he could only find the words.
Do you think justice has been done, Peter?
"I'm glad to be out, if that's what you're asking."
No, not exactly.
You've changed your place in this world!
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when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
the bad idea or me befallen by it?
This is an outrage and mockery of justice and the legal system, as a whole.
~Michael Bolton
took the words right out of my mouth
live like your dying today
'I knew the knife was in me'Teen stabbing victim writes an open letter to the judge who allowed his assailant to return to live across the street
By MIKE STROBEL
I wrote yesterday of the unprovoked and nearly fatal stabbing of Markham teen Nicolas Lastoria.
Neighbour Peter Galanos, 32, was found "not criminally responsible" by Justice William Gorewich last week and sent home. Take your paranoia-schizophrenia meds, the man was told.
This, little more than three months after the attack.
Neither York Regional cops nor Nicolas' mom, paramedic Elsa Ferraro, 45, were forewarned that a ruling was nigh.
"There was some kind of breakdown," says police Chief Armand LaBarge, who is trying to wrest a remedy from the Crown's office.
"The matter was disposed of without any contact with York Regional Police," LaBarge tells me.
"We're extremely concerned about this individual being back in the community, in immediate proximity to the victim."
Galanos, by the by, was "known to police," as they say, before the knifing.
The sudden ruling also deprived young Nicolas of his right to submit a victim's impact statement to court.
So, I meet him at his mom's near McCowan and Hwy. 7 and we sit at a laptop for an hour.
Over to you, Nicolas ...
---
Dear Justice Gorewich:
I am writing this at my mom's kitchen table, across the street from the man who stabbed me.
I just turned 16. I was 15 when I was attacked while I was working on my pocket bike (that's a miniature motorcycle) in our garage.
When Peter Galanos came home last week, I saw him once, getting into his car, before my mom sent me out of town to stay with my dad.
I am going back there after I write this.
I would like to tell you how my life and my family have been affected since April 22 around 1:30 in the afternoon.
You probably know most of what happened. I could show you the five scars on my back, side and arm.
He never said a single word, just crossed the street and started stabbing.
I was confused and a little pissed off. I didn't know what was happening.
The thing I remember most was looking down once and seeing the knife go into my ribs.
I can't really explain to you what that was like. It didn't really hurt, but I knew the knife was in me.
I got away and ran up the street for help. I didn't want him to follow me into my house. My mom and two sisters were inside.
The air from my lung was leaking out of one of the holes from the knife.
I NEARLY DIED
I don't remember much about the first two days in hospital, but I know I nearly died and for two months after, I could hear my lung gurgling when I breathed.
Now it has stopped doing that. But I am still angry and afraid.
It's fear of not knowing what might come across the street and to the door.
A policeman came and told us he was back. I was so angry I paced the house. I didn't want to leave. I was afraid for my mother and sisters, but my mom said I had to go away for now. I will have to come back before school starts.
She's still the same mom, but much more anxious.
My sisters, too.
My mother is a paramedic and she says my lung is weak and more likely to collapse again, but she is mostly worried about emotional scars.
I have started going to counselling with a psychologist she knows through work.
My friends all think it's crazy that Peter is home so soon.
I think it was the wrong decision. Peter should be the one to go away. I don't want to move.
I like this house and this area and I want to stay at the same school. I'm going into Grade 11.
Before this, I used to think no one would hurt me.
I'm not the same kid I was.
Now, in my mind, I don't trust anyone. I get suspicious of people I meet walking and think of how I will defend myself if I have to.
I don't think we should have to live like this.
Sincerely,
Nicolas Lastoria
P.S. I want my jeans and my shoes back from that day. They took them for evidence. They were my favourite jeans and shoes. They probably still have blood all over them, but I want them back.
~Michael Bolton