W Crescent is in the news again. A man was in court yesterday facing charges for stabbing his three tiny children (ages 8 weeks, 18 months and three years). The children all survived, which has to be some sort of miracle.
W Crescent is a street in Naenae, in Lower Hutt – my home town. It’s not a particularly remarkable street, maybe a hundred or hundred-twenty properties. Not a lot of money, sure, but that hardly sets it apart from countless other streets in the city and the country. (The new nationwide initiative to formally certify ‘underclass streets‘ has passed Wilkie Cres over, as well.)
In fact, W Cres is entirely unremarkable. I only know where it is because a friend of mine lives there. K is a wonderful guy, been a friend for a long time, and just the other day randomly gifted me with a half-dozen vintage Ren & Stimpy mugs and glasses.
So when this stabbing happened in W Cres, I sat up. That is K’s street. And the weird thing is, that little street already has a reputation for terrible things. It has been the venue for some horrible, horrible crimes in the last six or seven years. Not just your garden-variety drunken violence, but seriously weird stuff that has to involve some mental illness and dissociation from reality. A severed head in the bathtub was the last one that made the national news in a big way, but it wasn’t the only such event. (I’ve tried googling up details but can’t find anything – the fact that there are no searchable NZ news archives on the web is utterly ridiculous.)
W Cres has an incredibly high incidence of murder and grievous bodily harm, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. Just one of those statistical bumps. Heck, the family in the current incident had only moved there three weeks ago! But as much as I rationally understand that it’s just random, it troubles me anyway. I want to look for a cause. I want to understand why bad things keep happening there, so they don’t have to happen any more. Bad feng shui? Corruption in the pipes? Vengeful ghosts?
New Zealand has issues with mental health, particularly depression. We have issues with drugs, particularly alcohol and methamphetamine. There are a lot of problems simmering away under the surface. And for whatever reason, W Cres is one place where these issues keep bubbling to the surface.
So, what’s the matter with W Cres? I guess only this: exactly the same things as everywhere else in this country.