‘Go ahead and shoot!” Gina Ducharme shouted at the youth, who was pointing a rifle at her.
“It’ll be the last thing you ever do.”
Ducharme, the manager of Takhini Mobile Home Park, thought she was facing a pellet gun.
In fact, it turned out to be a full-blown rifle.
Wednesday afternoon, Ducharme investigated a complaint about two kids playing with pellet guns.
“We’ve been having problems with pellet guns,” she said.
“Earlier in the year, somebody was shooting at one of my workers with one.”
Ducharme, a friend and the tenant who made the complaint chased the kids towards the cliffs.
The adults ordered the fleeing youth to come back.
“That’s when he pointed the gun at me,” she said.
Ducharme didn’t think anything of it.
“It might leave a hole in my jeans, but that’s it.”
However, her friend recognized it was a real firearm capable of lethal damage.
Later they found the bullets.
“They were freakin’ huge!” said Ducharme.
The adults were able to talk to the boy, who was visibly drunk, into giving up his weapon peacefully.
The other boy continued down the embankment.
Ducharme was “cradling the gun like a baby” when a weapon was pointed at her for the second time that afternoon.
“Drop the gun,” an RCMP officer yelled with his own firearm drawn.
Another neighbourhood resident had called the RCMP after hearing one of the boys threaten to shoot someone.
They had arrived on the scene shortly after the first boy was disarmed.
The youth was handcuffed and put into the back of a police vehicle, while officers pursued the other with the assistance of a police dog.
That second individual was caught by police, stated an RCMP release.
Two males, aged 14 and 16, are each being charged with one count of assault with a weapon, possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes, unauthorized possession of a firearm, pointing a firearm, and uttering threats.
Both youths appeared in court on Thursday.
The event was not common for the trailer park, said Ducharme.
“We’ve had kids pulling pranks, vandalism — you know, kids’ stuff.”
“We just try to catch them and tell their parents,” she said.
It wasn’t until afterwards, that she was able to understand the full danger of the situation.
“I never would have gone near the kid if I would have thought it was a real gun.”