An update on Ottawa’s pirate radio station
It appears that the mastermind behind our friendly neighbourhood pirate radio station from just over a year ago is not quite so friendly after all.
The Ottawa Citizen has had a number of stories in the last day or so about court appearances for various charges related to the illegal pirate radio station an unnamed youth was running from his parent’s hotel in December 2009 and January 2010. Though not named in the stories because he’s protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, there’s only been one underage individual in Ottawa who was running a pirate radio station that was taken down in a high-profile raid last year.
It seems that in addition to violating the Radiocommunication Act, he is alleged to have made threatening phone calls to a couple of local radio personalities and also to the Industry Canada employee who was responsible for the investigation into his illegal radio station and the eventual raid. It was during this raid that he allegedly pushed a police officer (never a good idea) and uttered death threats against some of the people involved in the raid.
All of these are serious charges that could cause him problems for years to come. Being convicted of violating the Radiocommunications Act can result in some non-trivial fines and/or imprisonment. The Act allows for the someone to be convicted for each day that the offence continues, which could result in fairly significant fines, not to mention jail time.
But this pales in comparison to how serious it would be to be convicted of uttering death threats against people and assaulting a peace officer.
It’s really too bad that it came to this, but hopefully he will finally come to accept that he is responsible for the consequences of his actions and that the rules that apply to the rest of us also apply to him.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
I am surprised his parents weren’t dragged into this. Read all the stuff in the newspaper articles and two thoughts came to mind: a) the kid is a douchebag, but that’s why we have a youth justice system, let’s hope he can learn; and b) how did this happen at his parents’ place of business, with their full knowledge, and none of it stick on THEM.
I noticed that, too. I wonder if they’ll enter the picture during the sentencing portion of the trial. It sounds like they’re still establishing facts at this point.
Could be the parents had no idea what it was he was doing. Personally, I’d be proud of my kid tinkering with electronics and showing aptitude with it. I wouldn’t even consider the fact that he might be violating laws.
Parents can’t hang around their kids 24/7 and certainly can’t be to blame for everything their child does. Besides, this isn’t a kid kid – it’s a teen no? Did you tell everything you did to your parents? Did you not have things you did that they didn’t know about?
Prime example, Gord running servers (BBS, mailing list, whatever) out of his parent’s basement – did they have a clue what he was doing or was he “just playing with his computers” and “at least he’s not into drugs or alcohol” type stuff? What if you were doing something illegal? Would they have had the capacity to know that?
Maybe the parents are not in the picture because they didn’t know he was actually doing something illegal and they’re making him face up to the consequences of his actions rather than coddle and protect him?
Perhaps at the very beginning they were oblivious to his running an illegal broadcast radio station, but when they started being interviewed by reporters they should have figured out something wasn’t right. And after the first time they were served a cease-and-desist notice they definitely should have figured out something wasn’t right.
And this quote by his father in mid-December indicates they were aware it wasn’t right and also speaks volumes to the control they had over their son:
And I find it extremely difficult to believe that his parents were so oblivious to what was going on that they failed to notice the antenna tower he had installed or the professional electrical work that was done to support the several kilowatt transmitter. People in the know were estimating that he had something like $80000 worth of equipment, which he apparently bought with money he inherited. How can a 13 or 14-year old be considered responsible enough to have unfettered access to such large sums of money?
I listened to some clips of him taking to his family, particularly his mother, and to say he was a rude, spoiled, controlling brat is an understatement.
Regardless of how you slice it, his parents have a certain amount of responsibility, particularly after they became aware that he was breaking the law and they need to be held accountable, too.
The fact of his father running ads for the Hotel with “MIX 91.9” on them kind of obviates the fact that at least the father knew what was going on.
Hell, there’s still an ad like that at the corner of Walkley and Hawthorne
I’ve been wondering about that sign for a while. It has similar images on it to the amateurish website for the future hotel that junior is the webmaster for. When all this was building up in late-2009, someone hunted down the legitimate website that some of the images came from along with the canned template. Ve been wondering if junior was the one who made those signs with some of the fairly large pile of money he appears to have (had?) unfettered access to.
Daddy probably owns the land, but maybe told junior he could design the website and signs for it since it’s not a project that appears to be destined to be in the planning stage for a long time. I wouldn’t put it past junior to add his little pirate radio station logo without daddy really appreciating what it was.
The company owner has to answer for ads for his company. Dad can’t weasel out of it that way.
Oh, I completely agree, but coming up with a more plausible explanation is proving difficult.
And this story reports that daddy apparently drove junior to the radio station where one of the people he allegedly threatened worked. Nice, eh?
The trial has apparently started. One of the DJs mentioned in the article is a friend of mine.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Death+threat+against+radio+wasn+serious+teen+testifies/4557931/story.html
It’s been going on for most of the last week. I haven’t seen an update in a couple of days, though.