A 12-year-old Nanaimo boy spent Wednesday night behind bars on an armed robbery charge.
On Tuesday, the youth, who's had more than 100 run-ins with police, pulled a replica handgun on a 21-year-old victim and demanded his cellphone and cash.
The victim, who was getting out of his vehicle, fled and called police with a suspect description allowing officers to quickly capture the adolescent and another boy who was with him at the time.
Investigators have yet to determine if the second boy was an accomplice or oblivious to the heist.
Police cannot identify the suspects under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Sgt. Sheryl Armstrong said youth involved in the justice system are more likely to be shoplifting than holding people at gunpoint.
"I've been in the RCMP for 29 years and I've never had a 12-year-old pull an armed robbery with a weapon," she said.
She added the boy's mother is working with police and the Ministry of Children and Family development to correct the boy's behaviour.
Armstrong is hoping government-funded therapy options can be offered to now that the boy can be formally charged under the YCJA because he is 12 years old.
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- Reporter
- Dharm Makwana currently serves as a web editor at The Province, British Columbia's best read daily newspaper. For more than four years he wrote on issues affecting the Lower Mainland for the province's third largest daily newspaper Vancouver 24 hours. Before arriving in Vancouver in January 2007, Dharm won the John Lott Scholarship for outstanding journalism at Centennial College. Since then Dharm has developed an interest in municipal and provincial politics, crime and policing and social issues including immigration, prostitution and trafficking. He is currently working on a series of stories involving Vancouver's sex workers.
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-Bill Murray
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