No easy answers to help troubled kids

There is something almost holy about a city’s Main Street.

Had George Baker’s ill-fated walk Sunday night taken place on Fifth Street, or Fort Avenue, or Boonsboro Road, what happened to him would have been equally tragic. Somehow, though, the fact that he was killed on Main Street made it worse.

Main Street serves not only as the spinal column of most cities, but the name has a ring of solid normality to it. Nothing bad is ever supposed to happen there.

Making the whole sad affair even worse, if that’s possible, was the fact that Baker was visiting our city from far-away Arizona, in town for his granddaughter’s wedding. At a time when Lynchburg is struggling to jump-start tourism, his death was a double blow.

I don’t want to convict the three defendants — ages 16, 16 and 13 — without a trial. Until their court date, we won’t know what actually happened in the 1100 block of Main that night, or who played what role. The accepted facts seem to be that the 81-year-old Baker was attacked without apparent provocation and died of his injuries.

The question is, will this be a wakeup call? For years, local police have been warning us about the growth of local gangs and youth crime. As long as this was confined to certain parts of town, it was easy to ignore.

The thing is, the kids who police say took out their anger on poor George Baker were not space aliens. For better or worse, they belong to our community.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” said Danny McCain, the longtime superintendent of the Lynchburg Detention Center before he retired several years ago. “There have been a couple of other cases of kids beating up elderly people, and one of them also died.”

Just not on Main Street.

Some kids are like pack animals — thrown together unsupervised, they are likely to do things they would never do individually. The pack has no conscience.

So what makes these young people turn feral? McCain has a ready list: no supervision at home, failure in school, cultural influences. It’s not a mystery. Many of them fall off the societal merry-go-round at an early age and can’t climb back on.

I’m reminded of a line from the Jackson Browne song “The Pretender,” about those who “tear at the world with all their might, while the ships bearing their dreams sail out of sight.”

As long as they tear at each other, it’s somebody else’s problem. George Baker’s death changed the game.

Danny McCain is not an apologist for kids gone wrong. In order to function in his role at the Detention Center, he had to be tough.

But he’s also a realist, and he sees that in the process of marginalizing the “troubled” youth, we also are giving them power.

“We can’t let them defeat us,” he said. “Nobody wants to have programs for older kids — except for Jubilee and a few others — because they’re scared of what could happen. So all the kids suffer because of a few. No more school dances.”

In our society, McCain believes, young people can only validate themselves by going to college. Everyone else is a failure.

“Almost every kid who came to the Detention Center when I was there was reading below grade level,” he said. “They sit in class and aren’t learning anything, and so they just give up.”

That’s their problem, you say. True enough. But if they don’t have anyone in their life who cares about what they do, the odds are stacked against their achieving success.

“We’ve got to catch them while they’re young,” McCain said.

He said he and some other local civic leaders are planning a meeting — prompted in part by the Baker case — to discuss the problems facing many of Lynchburg’s youth and the dilemma that creates for everyone else.

“I’m not sure we’ll have any solutions,” he admitted.