Shelly Lynn St. Arnaud isn’t sure if her son will ever recover from the vicious assault he was the alleged victim of last Friday evening.
Randy is a sport-loving 16-year-old who is now in a hospital bed at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. As of Tuesday morning he and his mother continued to wait for an update from a neurologist.
In that moment, St. Arnaud wasn’t feeling good about the boy’s situation.
“He’s still not eating, he’s on IV and his concussion is a lot worse than we thought,” she said over the phone at her son’s beside.
“If he tries to get up he either faints or gets extremely dizzy to the point where he vomits.“
The mother says her son found himself in the hospital after an argument between teens escalated to violence Friday evening at the waterfront skate park. In a Facebook message sent to tbnewswatch.com, St. Arnaud describes an altercation that eventually led to her son being struck with a Razor scooter.
That was the alleged blow that led to the severe concussion, brain bleed, and lacerated ear Randy now suffers from.
Randy’s mother isn’t sure how this will affect him long term. Already a special needs teen, Randy faces the possibility of never recovering from his current injuries.
“I don’t know if I will ever get my son back,” she said through tears.
“He’s an amazing child. He’s a people person and loves to be around people. He’s caring and outgoing. He loves sports, especially football.”
Despite this incident, proponents of the waterfront skate park have come forward to reassure the public that it remains a safe place. And that’s something St. Arnaud agrees with.
Despite the situation she finds her son in now, St. Arnaud said there’s never been such a severe violent incident like the one on Friday that she is aware of.
She also said her son never had any problems at the skate park, a place that he frequented, that she was aware of.
But St. Arnaud is incredibly frustrated because she said the entire Friday evening incident could have been avoided.
She believes an adult at the scene may have played a part in encouraging the confrontation between Randy and another teen to escalate.
“The whole reason why I came forward is because there was an adult there who did not diffuse the situation when a normal adult would have.”
The Thunder Bay Police Service is now investigating the incident, and an official says it is becoming a fairly complicated case.
With as many as 20 witnesses to both the alleged assault and the events that led up to it, local police spokesman Chris Adams said it could take a few more days for investigators to collect all the evidence they need.
“There’s quite a bit of a story to be told for our investigators,” Adams said.
Adams added that they are encouraging anyone who may have information to come forward.
The teens involved are known to each other, so Adams said there is no public safety concerns as a result of the assault.
