CHILDREN armed with slingshots fired at birds then kicked and beat to death the wounded animals as they tried to escape, according to a disgusted West Dubbo resident.
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The long-time resident, who had been threatened by and had windows smashed by children in her neighbourhood, said there had been a noticeable rise in the number of unsupervised children tormenting her and her neighbours during the school holidays.
The end-of-term break could not be over quick enough, she said.
While she did not want to be named for fear she would be further targeted, she echoed concerns raised by West Dubbo mother Katie Hall earlier this month in the wake of a slingshot attack, that someone could be seriously injured or killed by children who fired the weapons in their neighbourhood.
“I’ve seen kids with slingshots every day of the holidays, it’s been out of control,” she said.
“The first day there were two kids - the youngest maybe six and the oldest maybe nine-years-old.
“They hit a peewee (Magpie-lark) with a rock from a slingshot and it was unable to fly but as it tried to scramble up a tree they got a stick and whacked it like a golf ball.
“The next day a bigger group of them, maybe 10 of them, wounded one with a slingshot and it also tried to get away up a tree and they just kicked it and sent it flying like a football.
“From my window, I yelled out to them to stop being so cruel and they yelled out at me to ‘f—k off’,” the woman said.
It was only when they saw her with her phone to her ear calling to report the incidents to police that the gang of children took off and were last seen running along O’Donnell Street, the woman said.
The resident, who had been among those to whom Australia Post suspended mail deliveries in 2013 after children attacked posties, said there had been a pleasing decline in crime and anti-social behaviour in the wake of the mail suspension.
But now problems with unsupervised children in those streets had again started to emerge, she said.
“I’m always ringing the council because the kids are destroying the sprinklers and the other day they were using some sort of hatchet to cut a tree out of the ground, that’s just what you want, kids running around with a little axe,” she said.
“Pioneer Park must cost a lot of money to maintain - the kids tried to burn down a brick wall and are using slingshots to smash out all the lights around there, and cars keep getting burnt out and dumped there.
“It wasn’t so bad when there was so much lighting around the place you could see the colour of a cat’s eyes - now it’s so dark around these streets, you can hear the kids but you can’t see them.
“They were using slingshots to shoot at my yard and stir up my dog, and I’ve had to withdraw $1000 from my funeral fund to cover the cost of three broken windows.”
During the weekend, children had used a hose reel to smash holes in the walls of a house in her neighbourhood, the woman said.
The woman said she hoped Dubbo MP Troy Grant had not forgotten about his immediate area now that he had become Deputy Premier.
“Forget about getting your photo in the paper - get out here and look at this crime,” she said.
She said she did not have the solution to the problem but suggested the only way some parents would be responsible for their children was to hit them in the hip pocket if their kids hurt other people and their property.
“The government’s talking about people losing their benefits for not giving kids their needles, perhaps they need to take away their benefits if their kids don’t go to school,” she said.
“I am hoping, with school going back, that things won’t be so bad, but even when it’s not school holidays big mobs of kids walk around here during the day, and not a parent in sight.”