Erika Sherk
Northern News Services
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

YELLOWKNIFE - A Yellowknife store owner is still upset two weeks after stopping an attack by a group of teenage girls who beat on another right inside her store.

Qui Pham, owner of the Reddi Mart convenience store on 50th St., said the girls' target was another young girl all on her own.

"If I hadn't been there, the girl would have been beaten bad," said Pham.

After the group of girls ran off, the victim told Pham what had happened.

"The girls hit her head on a car outside," said Pham, "and she was scared and ran in the store."

The other girls chased her into a corner of the store and proceeded to punch her until Pham stepped in.

"She was so scared, she was just shaking," she said.

Pham said she called police, they came, and told her to call them again if the youths returned.

Such incidents make her upset, she said.

"I'm angry, I'm just so angry," said Pham.

It was the first time she has seen a group of teens attack an individual in her store. Normally her biggest problem with kids is shoplifting, she said.

Despite recent incidents of groups of youth assaulting individuals, RCMP say the so-called "swarmings" do not necessarily indicate youth gang activity in Yellowknife.

RCMP have noticed "nothing significant," said Const. Roxanne Dreilich, when asked if they were seeing a rise in this sort of violence.

There have been several incidents lately involving groups, she said, but RCMP are not seeing the same groups pop up repetitively, she said."There is the odd isolated case with more than one person involved but those same people don't seem to carry over into other incidents," she said.

Nonetheless, RCMP don't discount the fact that some sort of youth gang activity could be going on, though there's nothing conclusive pointing to that at this point, said Dreilich.

"It's certainly a possibility," she said. "It's something that will be investigated."

Everett Kaskamin works as a youth guidance counsellor at the John Howard Society in Yellowknife. He has heard rumours of youth gang activity, but it's all been very vague and not locally-based, he said.

"I heard there was a couple of gangs coming from the South, not sure how true that is," he said.

That information came from an adult, he said. He hasn't heard anything about youth gangs from the kids he works with.

Brad Nind, 14, who attends St. Patrick high school, said that he has come across supposed "gangs," but said they are nothing to be worried about.

"They're just posers," he said. "They'll try to talk tough, but there's no real violence."

Nind has seen fights in the summers, he said, "but it wasn't a big group of people, just one or two people fighting."

Two 18-year-old girls, both in Grade 12 at St. Patrick, who requested anonymity, said there aren't any youth gangs that they know of, the girls said. It's more like groups of friends that get a little rough if you cross them.

"You just have to mind your own business," said one. "If you have a bad experience with them they'll come back at you."