What’s The Matter With W Cres?

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.

7 thoughts on “What’s The Matter With W Cres?”

  1. dont for get the murder up onthe hill just there.
    its about 5 minutes from my place so its kinda freaky really.

  3. I saw a video once that included a 1950s? 60s? propaganda film about one of the fabulous new state subdivisions in the Hutt (and I really think it was in Naenae, but hey if it wasn’t, it could’ve been)… It was a utopian vision, with schools, parks and shopping centres for the kids and their mummies, nearby light industry providing jobs or a railway line for the daddies to go to work in the city. Now, this was the early nineties. There were no jobs, in the valley or elsewhere… but it was the 1st time I realised what a beautiful dream those depressing state housing areas represented. Are all such dreams doomed to failure? [Not that I would have wanted to live in that PARTICULAR utopia, but it was representative of its time, and the principle of affordable, high quality housing for everyone is one I support with all my heart]

  4. P.S. Having a bad old time at the moment and am trying to thank my lucky stars or count my blessings or whatever, and thought maybe I should tell you, that your blog is one of them… albeit a minor one. Thanks!

  6. Hey M, a question just occured to me:
    Given that the Stuff news article you linked named the crescent, why did you take the decision to only use the initial “W” in your post?

  7. Basically because I googled it looking for news reports about the previous incidents there, and instead found only (a) a real estate listing and (b) news about the latest violence.
    The news reports will disappear like the last ones have. But I don’t want prospective home-buyers to google the street name and find a blog post from me saying “this is where lots of evil murders happen!” Kinda defeats the purpose of the post, I guess. So I went back through and changed it to initials only.
    Although I notice I did leave a full name in the post body by accident, and this post now turns up second on google as a result. Oh well, can’t be bothered changing now. I hope any such future-googlers read this far and are not put off…

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