Neighborhood safety

“My son almost died,” said Regina Vickers, whose 16-year-old son, Kevin Vickers, was the victim of a baseball bat attack Saturday night, Aug. 16.
After the attack, Kevin was treated and released at Hannibal Regional Hospital, Regina said.
“Kevin is out of danger and is at home,” she said. However, she was told he was lucky to be alive.
“The ER doctor told me my son was very lucky,” she said. “He doesn’t know why the blows weren’t fatal. All the blows were to the head, and he was hit three to four times.”
Regina, who has lived at 105 Magnolia for the past year, said she and another neighbor had reported crimes involving juveniles at least four times this year, and the same juveniles are back again.
Despite the fact that a 17-year-old, Christopher Zeiger, who was arrested for assaulting her son, was not a juvenile, she said juveniles were with him at the time, and there are often incidents involving juveniles in her block of Magnolia. She said the police do arrest juveniles, but she is surprised the same juveniles are soon back on the street.
She would like to see some of the juveniles remain in custody, explaining, “I hope something happens before somebody dies.”
Meanwhile, Regina, the mother of seven children, is moving to another home in Hannibal today, Aug. 19, or Wednesday, and she will soon be leaving Hannibal. She is moving to a smaller town in New York.

Victim describes
ball bat attack
Regina explained that Kevin had told her before his attack Saturday night, he and two girls were sitting on the porch next door, where one of the girls lived, when a car with three girls and three boys stopped there.
“They wanted the girl to come down and fight them,” Regina said of the girl who lives at the house where they were sitting. “She went in the house and locked the door, and she tried to call me, but I didn’t hear the phone. Her dad came home right after that.”
Regina continued that Kevin had told her he and the other girl tried to get away from the people who had just arrived.
“Kevin and another girl were trying to get to my house a few feet away,” Regina said. “They were on the next door neighbor’s steps trying to get from that porch to my steps, and it didn’t work.
“He said the next thing he knew, they pulled out a baseball bat and started beating him on the head,” she said.
He was close enough to his home to go fall inside, she said, and his attacker was trying to follow him in. “When he fell in my front door, they were behind him,” Regina said. The others stopped when they saw Kevin’s 25 year-old son stand up, she said. “They ran.”
Kevin knew one of the people with Zeiger but did not know him, she said. “He (Kevin) had to look at a picture to identify him.”
Although she would like to see something done about the juvenile problems in the area, Regina had no complaints about the police officers who investigated her son’s attack. “The police did an excellent  job,” she said. “They were fantastic.”
“I’d like to commend them on their work yesterday, but we told them all summer this was going to happen.
“My block has made complaints on this same group of boys the entire summer,” Regina said, including a complaint she made in May about a juvenile with a gun being on the parking lot across Magnolia at the office building that was formerly St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
Regina said she and other neighbors had been told the police said when juveniles are involved they could only turn the information over the district juvenile officers.
Phil Livesay, chief juvenile officer with the 10th District Juvenile Office, explained that “as far as the police being able to do something, the police can act on any case. The police have the obligation of investigating these complaints and turning it over to us,” Livesay continued. “If it is founded, we act.
‘Every time there is a legitimate complaint that comes to us, we will take action.” He cannot discuss individual juvenile cases, he said.
“They should handle a juvenile case exactly like an adult,” he added. “They can take custody of juveniles who are suspects, if they have probable cause. The one difference is if they want to question a juvenile, our office has to be involved in that.”
Regarding how juvenile cases are handled, Capt. James Hark of the HPD said “if the police receive a call involving a juvenile, if a crime has been committed, we can take the juvenile into custody and release the juvenile back into parent’s custody once the juvenile office has been notified. Some are released back to parents and some to the 10th Judicial District Juvenile Office.”

Additional arrest
possible in current
assault case
Hark has said the attack for which Zeiger was arrested was reported to the police at 9:13 p.m. Saturday, and Zeiger had been arrested on a 24-hour hold for two counts of felony assault and two counts of unlawful use of a weapon (felony).
On Sunday Hark reported the police were interviewing potential witnesses about the incident, and “the investigation is continuing regarding an additional suspect.” No additional arrest had been made on Monday.
Hark confirmed what Regina said about a baseball bat being involved in the attack, although he did not confirm who was attacked. He said the investigation throughout the evening Saturday and Sunday led to the identification of several witnesses.
Despite the fact that this is the second incident in which someone has been assaulted in the same area within a week, after Rodney Wood suffered fatal injuries in the 2100 block of Broadway a week earlier, Hark said “the two assaults are not in any way tied together.
“What started with the juvenile (on Saturday, Aug. 16) started at a convenience store in the 1200 block of Broadway.
“It did not start at the house, so I can’t attribute it in any way to the incident that occurred last week, where Mr. Wood was assaulted and ultimately lost his life.”
Hark compared the neighbors along Broadway being upset to what happened in Oakwood when in 2004, “Cliff Jawad was murdered, and a Subway was robbed in a two-week window. The people of Oakwood were coming unglued, and it was just timing. ...If you look over the course of a year, there are not that many cases.”
He would like to see parents have more control over where their juvenile children are at night, Hark said. “Why are the parents allowing the kids to run up and down the streets? Not everything is a police matter, and the police can’t always be the parents.
“There comes a time when the parents have the responsibility to keep the kids in. When the kids reach the age of 17 they feel, they have the Constitutional right to move about, but prior to that age, it falls to the parents, the police and the entire community to monitor the children.”