New Year's Eve 1997, Squamish B.C., Bob McIntosh went down to the end of his street to look in on a party of young people because the parents of the host were gone for the holidays. When he left his house, he left a wife and four-year-old twins with a promise to be back soon to open their own bottle of champagne to ring in the New Year. Katy, Bob's wife, didn't get to open that bottle of champagne because her husband never walked out alive from that party of teenagers and young adults.
Bob was punched and kicked to death in an upstairs bedroom in the home, while 200 youth partied downstairs. No one intervened in the deadly assault and their code of silence afterwards meant it took the police considerable time and an undercover investigation to find then 20-year-old Ryan Aldridge, responsible for killing Bob. On Monday, May 5, starting at 7:30 p.m., at the Chatelech Secondary School theatre, Katy Hutchison (now remarried), the author of Walking After Midnight, will talk to parents and youth about how she found "the gift underneath the tragedy" that changed her life.
Through the tears, pain, loss and destruction of her life as it had been, Hutchison said she has an unshakable belief that it is our responsibility as parents, neighbours and citizens of a community to have strong relationships with our own children and to care and look out for the children of others as if they were our own. These are not idle or pretty words on Hutchison's part, they are her truth - a truth she's come to through her journey of experiencing death, isolation and looking into herself for what she thought was truly important about life and the life she wanted to give her own children. When Hutchison talks about Aldridge, now a 30-year-old man, she talks about how glad she is knowing that he is clean and sober, working full-time, paying taxes and that he has a loving girlfriend. This is what Hutchison feels about the person who more than 10 years ago punched her husband unconscious "to prove his bravado in front of his friends" and then "kicked his head in like it was a soccer ball." "Before I could forgive Ryan, I had to forgive myself. I had to forgive myself for moving on with my own life," she said.Once she did that, she said she wanted to meet Aldridge, to know how he had arrived at that place in his life. She offered him a chance to change and to create change. He took that challenge. He went through drug and alcohol counselling and treatment, anger and interpersonal counselling and he committed to work with Hutchison talking to youth, parents and the community.
Over the years, Aldridge has worked with Hutchison doing presentations about drugs, alcohol, peer pressure and anger.
"What I talk about," said Hutchison, "is the importance of talking with our children and opening up a dialogue with them about social responsibility."
She said too many young people are marginalized and isolated rather than being celebrated for the amazing beings they are. She said one of the most important things we can give and do for our young people is to listen to them and talk with them. Hutchison said it's time for adults to listen and talk now so that no young person goes through what Aldridge did, nor any family suffers the type of devastation hers did.
