Letters to the Editor
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Tempe
I used to work in downtown Tempe (I currently live a few miles away now but still in the Valley) and the street kids are absolutely 100% dangerous and no one wants to confront it.
I was in my very early twenties when I observed the rise of these groups in Tempe so I was the same age as these kids; it wasn't some generational inability to relate. I hung out in the coffee bars and watched it first hand with sick fascination; the beatings, the retaliations, the meth use. One incident I remember clearly was where a group of them took the belongings of a young homeless family and set them ablaze in the city park. When the police responded they attempted an ambush, came out of the bushes with weapons right out of Mad Max. After it was all said and done the cops were accused of provoking the incident and even of starting the fire. It was portrayed as ‘Local Cops Harass Homeless’. No one sees these gangs for what they are, gangs. During this time period it was the late 90’s and the kids had this whole fantasy scenario going about how Y2K was going to hit, there would be a battle and only they would know how to survive. Real Helter Skelter Manson like stuff and they were stockpiling weapons. I overheard all this stuff on the coffee shop patio where they congregated on Mill. One of them told me this point blank and how I would not survive the coming inferno. I told him he couldn’t survive a day without getting food or money from other people. If there was an apocalypse there would be no one to panhandle from and he’d starve. If anything, I would be eating him for breakfast, not the other way around. This was a shocking to him, I could almost see his fantasy world implode in his eyes. There’s a side to this fantasy world they are constantly creating that is almost cult like. My naïve roommate of the time became pals with some of them and invited one back to our apartment to use our shower. I went ballistic and tossed him out. Lo and behold a few days later someone tried to break in, and from the looks of it it was someone whom had been inside and knew where the door locks where because the glass next to it was knocked out in only those locations.
They use the trappings of the hippy generation to appear harmless and bohemian but they are not. Now that I think about it what went on at the old Spawn ranch with the Manson family very much mirrors these groups except the scary thing is the scale they function on is so much bigger and they slip around undetected.