First story in series
Sunday
The high cost of crime taking toll on Clark County
Scott Flury’s dream of opening a coffee shop almost wasn’t realized. Nine banks turned him down for a loan. So, he cashed in his 401(k), renovated the Victorian-era house he’d been eying for months and made it happen.
Since opening 3½ years ago, Latte Da Coffeehouse and Wine Bar has become a gathering spot in west Vancouver that hosts neighborhood association meetings, Toastmasters, the YWCA, political candidates, even a recent wedding. Flury held a big Halloween party on Saturday.
“That’s what the business plan was: to make a difference in our community,” he said.
The road from vacant property to bustling coffeehouse hasn’t been straight, and at one point last year, Flury’s dream felt threatened.
On New Year’s Day in 2013, Flury got ready to leave for Las Vegas with his then-girlfriend (now fiancée). He noticed a brick in Latte Da’s driveway and a light missing from the lawn, but didn’t think much of it. He replaced the light.
While he was on vacation, someone smashed the drive-thru window and stole some mocha mix. The vandals also shattered the window in a garage area that had been turned into customer seating.
Flury calculated that he would have to sell 39,000 cups of coffee to cover the $4,800 cost to repair the damage. And that wasn’t all. The vandals did more than $10,000 damage throughout the Lincoln neighborhood to other businesses and residences, he said.
More than money
Victims say that experiencing crime is more than just losing time and money. Crime comes with an emotional toll — a feeling of unease, powerlessness and lack of security — that can stick with someone throughout life.
“Windows can be replaced, glass can be replaced, but the dream gets hurt,” Flury said. “We all make choices. For every choice, there’s a consequence.”
Feeling upset, violated and paranoid, Flury slept in his coffee shop for a couple of nights after he returned home, not sure exactly what he would do if the vandals returned. Surveillance footage showed two teenage boys breaking in, so he became suspicious of every teenage boy who walked down the street.
Everybody copes with crime differently, said Mary Todd, a crime victim advocate with the Clark County prosecuting attorney’s office. For some, they can easily shake it off. For others, it can be a debilitating experience. Being victimized can make it difficult to do day-to-day activities. Relationships with people — neighbors, family and friends — may change, resulting in distancing or less trust. People may expect you to move on and you just can’t, Todd said.
She offers the example of a woman who was held at gunpoint while she was in her car with her daughter. Now, her daughter won’t ride in the car.
“You never gain back everything you lost,” Todd said. “The best you can hope for is that you learn how to live with it.”
In the digital age, she said, we’re hyper-connected. Victims can look up offenders online and might find them talking about the crime on Facebook, bragging even. That can trigger the return of negative feelings.
“I think that’s what crime does to anyone: It takes away your power,” she said. “It’s a spiritual, emotional, community cost.”
Todd is one of four advocates who answer questions, go with victims to interviews with attorneys and attend court proceedings with them — all experiences that can be intimidating.
Not everyone has a strong support system of loved ones and legal advocates.
Making a statement
The victim impact statement, where victims talk or write about how the crime affected them, is a huge part of the process, Todd said. Every victim in a felony-level case can make a statement, which can be a cathartic experience. It follows offenders and is used as part of their rehabilitation.
On Feb. 4, Allen Bricker was shot twice in the chest at his fourth-floor office of the VA Northwest Health Network. A few months later, he wrote a statement for the suspect’s upcoming trial.
“Prior to this incident, I would have described myself as a relaxed and easy-going personality. This is no longer the case; this incident has changed the very core of who I am. My prior tendency to trust strangers has been replaced with suspicion,” Bricker wrote in the statement. “I find it difficult to be in public now; I’m nervous about having strangers behind me and I constantly evaluate escape routes when I do go out.
“She stalked me and my family for two years, where she promised to kill me and nearly accomplished it,” Bricker wrote.
Crimes don’t have to be so serious to shake someone’s sense of security. Angelica Perez was recently found guilty of residential burglary in Vancouver’s Marrion neighborhood. She entered a house through an unlocked window, according to court documents. The restitution amount requested in the case was $1,632.25. But the damage to the family of five is something that can’t be totaled.
The mother described in the victim impact statement filed in court how the crime rattled her children, who were home at the time of the burglary.
“Every parent has seen fear on their children’s faces one time or another, but I have seen fear many times a day and every evening as bedtime rolls around … She stole my kids’ sense of protected well-being just as surely as the collection of our things she was gathering as she went room to room,” the mother wrote in her statement for the court.
“Ms. Perez, through her complete and total lack of concern for anyone else other than herself, has left my youngest son, who is 9 years old, almost completely consumed with the idea that someone more than likely is hiding behind every door in every room of the house.
“My daughter seems to be caught up with running a parallel between the unexplainable actions of Ms. Perez and what has happened. She keeps trying to understand. ‘Does she hate us, Mom?’ ‘We haven’t done anything to her; I don’t even know her.’ ‘Why would she break into our house?’
“Ms. Perez can’t imagine the fear she has buried my children in, let alone my husband feeling even worse because ‘he wasn’t here to protect us,'” the statement said.
The victim impact statement can be used during the offender’s sentence to remind them that even if they don’t consider what they did as a big deal, their victims may see things differently, Todd said.
A resolution, a relationship
For a long time after the Latte Da vandalism, Flury was just mad and so were his customers. It took him a while to realize that the crimes at his coffeehouse weren’t personal. It had to get personal for him to learn that.
Through a meeting facilitated by the Clark County Juvenile Court’s Victim Impact Program, Flury and other victims met face-to-face with the two teenagers responsible for the neighborhood crime spree.
The program has taken on 13,626 cases since it started in 2000, including 868 so far this year, according to coordinator Jeff Olsen, who facilitates the victim-offender meetings.
“It allows them to see each other as people, as humans,” he said. It’s part of restorative justice, which focuses on the needs of victims, offenders and the community when addressing crimes.
The name of one of the convicted teens who talked with The Columbian is being withheld because he is a juvenile. The teen, referred to as Tyler, explained at the victim-offender meeting that he began occasionally sneaking out of the house at night with one of his friends. At first they just went to the neighborhood store. It became more and more frequent, until the pair roamed the neighborhood every night and added vandalism into the mix.
“At the time, I thought this was funny,” he said. It was just a way to have a good time with his friend.
Through his talks with Flury, he realized how the crime impacted business. People might walk by, see the damage and decide not to patronize the shop. Regular customers were upset about the eyesore and what had happened to their beloved coffeehouse. Instead of spending time growing his business, Flury was trying to undo the damage that had been done. It made the community look bad.
Flury and the other victims learned more about the boys behind the crimes, their backgrounds and why they did what they did. The boys, in turn, learned more about how the crimes hurt their victims. Among them, there was a common desire to give the teens help rather than punishment.
“It took me a bit of time to understand these kids needed more help than they were getting,” Flury said.
Tyler said he and his accomplice from the string of property crimes are no longer friends. He’s gotten more involved with his victims than perhaps your typical offender. After serving his sentence, Tyler started getting his hair cut at the salon where he broke a window. He occasionally stops by Flury’s shop for a cup of coffee and a quick hello.
The boy and business owner took a vested interest in each other. Flury came to one of Tyler’s swim meets and talked to him about being on the swim team during his college days.
“I never would have known that if I hadn’t met him and gotten on good terms with him,” the teen said.
During his nighttime hijinks, Tyler once lit a port-a-potty on fire at Jason Lee Middle School. As part of his sentence, his community service was working the concession stands and cleaning the restrooms for Vancouver West Soccer Club, which practices at the school.
After he completed the required amount of community service hours, the club hired him.
His experience has been more personal, but also more productive. Having a job means he’s making regular restitution payments, and he’s doing something that’s contributing to a business rather than taking from it.
“I really saw the weight of everything I did,” he said.
