Four Canadian teens were hanging out at the skate park when they noticed a clearly upset young girl with two older men walking towards the parking garage.
The teenage girl looked terrified. “She was screaming and yelling,” one of the skateboarders, Carsyn Write, recalls. What was going on here?
The four friends approached the men and asked them what they were doing. They weren’t going to let them hurt the girl.
“She just wanted to be out of there,” Wright said.
One of the men explained to the teens that he was her father. The girl didn’t ask for help, nor did she try to escape from the men. So, the boys backed off.
Still, they had a feeling that something was wrong. Was the man lying?
The more the teens thought about it, the more uneasy they became. The girl looked intoxicated, but the man who claimed to be her father had behaved very arrogantly—violent, even.
Why would a father treat his child this way? “She was all scuffed up and dirty,” Carsyn recalls.
The girl looked like she had been resisting the two men for a while. But what baffled them the most was the fact that the man who claimed to be her father hoisted her up over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes!
Who would do this to their own child? The boys rushed back, hoping they weren’t too late. They knew they wouldn’t forgive themselves if they didn’t try to save the girl.
“You don’t want to really think of the worst in somebody like that. You don’t want that situation to be real, so you just brush it off and hope for the best,” Wright said. He admitted he wasn’t convinced at first.
When they arrived at the parking lot, the girl and the two men were nowhere in sight. Where had they gone?
The teens searched the inside of the underground parking lot and found the trio by the stairwell. The four friends were disgusted by what the two men were doing to the teenage girl.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Arnaud Nimenya, one of the boys, said. They rushed to separate the men from the girl.
The men were furious when they realized they had company. “He pushed me aggressively out of the way, kinda like just gives me the smile, like, ‘I can do this. You can’t do anything about it,” Nimenya recalls.
As the men tried to leave the crime scene, they turned to see three teens running behind them. One of the friends stayed behind to comfort the shaken girl. But would they catch the two men?
It didn’t take long for the three friends to catch up to them. The men had nowhere to go. One of them turned around to face the boys and ripped a skateboard from one of the teen’s hands.
He then used it as a weapon, trying to scare them away. But he had no idea that the police were already on their way.
The police officers hauled the two men and handcuffed them. The three teens then returned to the parking lot where their friend was waiting with the girl.
They went home, not knowing just how grateful everyone would be for their heroic efforts.
The four teenagers didn’t realize what awaited them, though. They started to receive strange phone calls but were too afraid to answer.
Were they in trouble for attacking the men? Or worse, what if the men were trying to find them?
It turned out that the person calling them was the police chief, Chief Const. Roger Chaffin. He simply wanted to thank the boys for what they had done.
Eventually, one of the boys answered the phone and was surprised by what he was told. All this time, he thought that the men were trying to get in touch with him.
The three friends were invited to attend the Chief’s Award Gala.
The local community and the police force wanted to thank them in person for saving the young girl’s life.
The four friends later explained that they didn’t think what they had done was special. They saw that the girl was in danger and rushed to help her.
Now, they will always trust their instincts.
These boys are very brave. Not everyone their age would find the courage to chase two grown men.
What would you do if you had found yourself in a similar situation?
