Code of Silence : Determined Not to ‘Rat’ on Peers, Canadian Teens Kept the Secret of a Killing

In this Vancouver suburb, kids hang out and gossip at the Whalley Exchange, a row of bus shelters across the street from the local roller rink. That’s where, last summer, they began sharing reports of “bones and a body” in a nearby park.

“I heard that a kid killed somebody over a dope deal,” recalled Scott Jennings, a clean-cut 17-year-old who often rides his bicycle to the exchange to sample the day’s gossip.

“I heard there was a body down in the flats,” said Kyle Berkson, 16, his rougher-edged acquaintance, who admits to some scrapes with the law.

The dead boy, according to the swelling gossip, was Shawn Jack Tirone, 12, who, the gossip went, had been bludgeoned to death by a 14-year-old acquaintance.

Now it appears that even as George Tirone was plastering telephone poles with posters of his missing son, children were whispering accounts among themselves of the boy’s death.

Only in recent weeks--after the discovery April 1 of Tirone’s remains in Bolivar Park and the arrest of a suspect this month--have authorities learned that dozens, and possibly hundreds, of children knew of the slaying, which the young people apparently kept as their secret for eight months.

A 14-year-old Surrey youth, whose name has been withheld in accordance with Canada’s Young Offenders Act, is charged with second-degree murder in connection with Tirone’s death and is in custody awaiting trial.

The young people’s silence is reminiscent of a 1981 episode in the Northern California town of Milpitas, where for three days 13 youths kept quiet about the murder of a 14-year-old girl while they made trips into the hills to view her corpse.

“River’s Edge,” a movie based on that case, portrayed the teen-agers involved as nihilistic representatives of a “blank generation,” according to director Tim Hunter.

Whalley, the neighborhood of Surrey (population 223,000) where Shawn Tirone lived, resembles a California suburb, with signs of chaotic development and a blur of fast-food restaurants along the main thoroughfare.

It is a high-mobility area with many low-income, single-parent families, said Stephen Bornemann, director of the Whalley Mental Health Center. He described the community as “disjointed and disrupted.”

Experts who work with young people, straining to explain both the Surrey and Milpitas cases, point not so much to a lack of conscience among the young people involved as to the power of the local youth culture. In the absence of meaningful communication with adults, they say, many teen-agers apparently feel allegiance only to the norms and behaviors of their peer group.

“Kids have adopted some rules they’re playing by and we don’t know what those rules are,” said Max Scott, executive director of Boys Republic in Chino, a school for troubled youths.

Asked to comment on the Surrey case, USC sociology professor Malcolm Klein observed that juvenile life has grown increasingly separate from adult life over the past century, “and that separation yields youth norms as opposed to adult norms.”

The plain facts, people in Surrey say, is that while most adults would agree murder is the ultimate crime, some teen-agers say there is a greater transgression: ratting.

Asked why her friends didn’t tell police about the Milpitas murder, one girl told a reporter at the time: “Their whole mentality is you don’t narc (tell) on people.”

In Surrey, children apparently failed to report that a peer might be dead and his body hidden in a local park not to protect the suspect but, as Scott Jennings put it, because “if you say anything around here (about a crime), you’re dead.”

Colin Barkhouse, 18, added: “Down here, if you’re a rat, you can’t walk the streets. Personally, I think all rats should be shot.”

Police say that, as far as they can tell, none of the teen-agers who talked about the slaying at the exchange visited the site where Tirone’s body was apparently rolled down a shallow incline into the underbrush. And it seems that Tirone, who only recently had moved to the area and had not yet enrolled in school, had few--if any--close friends.

Shawn Tirone lived with his father, a construction worker who moved often in search of work. The Tirones had just moved to Vancouver from inland British Columbia last July, when Shawn--described by his father as a small, adventurous boy--failed to return home from a swimming trip and was reported to police as a missing child.

Police say Shawn Tirone died as a result of a blow to the head, which fractured his skull.

Although the suspect in the case has not been named officially, a reporter soon learns that his name is common knowledge among Surrey youths, who say the boy began talking about the crime soon after it was committed.

Estimates vary as to just how far the story spread in the eight months between Tirone’s disappearance and the discovery of his body after it was spotted by a passing jogger. Staff Sgt. Bob Briske says members of the Surrey detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have interviewed 10 to 15 children so far who knew of the crime and are continuing to interview others.

Rob Chance, a college student who works with teen-agers at a Whalley youth center, believes about 50 children knew. “I think it would be very hard for kids to keep it close to their chest,” he said. “I can imagine (the news) rippling from school to school.”

Some youths say the killing was known to hundreds of teen-agers in the 16 secondary schools in Surrey. “In every school around here in Surrey, at least half the school knew,” said Kyle Berkson.

“I heard it from everybody. Almost every single street kid in Whalley knew about it for almost a year,” said Scott Jennings, referring to the street-wise kids he hangs out with.

Some children say they didn’t take action because information traded at the exchange isn’t always reliable, and they simply didn’t believe the early reports of a body in the park.

“I just thought it was a joke,” said Jennings.

“You hear so much on the street. I didn’t believe it at first,” said Colin Barkhouse.

But, as details were added to the original tale, and the report began to take on reality for some children, the “no rat” ethic took over.

“I asked so many kids on the street: ‘Have you seen this boy?’ ” said George Tirone. In retrospect, he said, some of them must have been children who had heard about the killing down at the Whalley Exchange.

Jennings had heard talk of the killing for months. Then, on April 28, he attended a friend’s 16th birthday party, where someone introduced him to the boy widely reported to be the culprit.

“So, is it true you killed a little boy?” Jennings asked the skinny youth, who was wearing braces.

“Yeah, I did,” he said the boy answered, “but all I wanted to do was beat him up.”

Jennings went home to the apartment he shares with his mother above a restaurant just off Surrey’s main drag.

“It was 20 minutes to 12 at night and Scott said he wanted the car,” his mother recalls. “His face was white. That’s not his nature. It’s hard to shake him.”

Scott Jennings said he went to the police station and told what he knew.

About 3 a.m., Jennings said, an officer drove him in a patrol car to Bolivar Park, a 21-acre, densely wooded park on the fringes of Surrey. Scott led the way down the slippery, overgrown path to the swampy clearing where Tirone’s body had been found. He said he knew where it was because the suspect had told him.

As to why he talked, Jennings said later, “The reason I went to the police is because I heard it from (the suspect) himself. I was disgusted. Someone was murdered a year ago and nobody said anything. You have to do something right to correct the wrong.”

After Jennings told police that “a lot of people knew” about the crime, more youths came forward to talk to police. Briske said none of the youths will be charged for withholding information. (Three teen-agers in the Milpitas case were convicted as accessories to the crime, said Sgt. Ron Icely of the Milpitas Police Department, but only because they tampered with the victim’s remains.)

The Surrey detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has ruled out the influence of gangs, cults and satanism in the case, according to Staff Sgt. Briske. Briske declined to discuss any other possible motives, including the alleged dispute over drugs, before the trial. If convicted, under the laws covering juveniles, the youth charged with Tirone’s murder faces a maximum sentence of three years.

The teen-agers who knew about Tirone’s killing refer to themselves as street kids, a term that seems to describe their allegiances more than their actual circumstances. They favor tank tops, jeans and tennis shoes, with accents such as multiple earrings for the boys and the occasional tattoo. Cigarette-smoking is common.

Most live with a working parent. They may or may not go to school. Some have been in minor trouble with the police.

Sgt. Icely said the youths involved in the California case had similar backgrounds. They were not “the bottom feeders,” he said, but they weren’t student council leaders, either.

Joyce Ham, 15, of Surrey, described her crowd as “average kids. We live at home. We’re not innocent, but we’re not as bad as a lot of people. We don’t go out and shoot people for fun on Friday night.”

Many of the Surrey teen-agers have little trusting contact with parents or other adults, say local youth workers. This estrangement apparently was a factor in Milpitas, where one boy said he didn’t tell his parents about the murder because “I don’t relate to them.”

Under circumstances such as these, “kids start looking outside of the family for all their needs, and for those kids, the peer group has tremendous power,” said Scott, of Boys Republic.

Perhaps because of their preoccupation with their friends, it apparently was difficult for the children to empathize with Tirone’s family when the boy vanished. In interviews, none of the children involved said they had even thought about what the victim’s family was going through in the eight months he was missing.

Yet their silence didn’t mean they approved of what happened.

In interviews, several children said it was wrong that a 14-year-old would kill a 12-year-old, suggesting they thought it was an unequal fight. Scott Jennings told his mother he was upset that it was “a baby” who was killed.

In the opinion of several local teen-agers interviewed for this story, someone who cheats another kid should pay with a beating, but not with his life.

“I can see beating someone up, but murder. . . ,” Kyle Berkson shook his head.

“He (the suspect) should have beat him (Tirone) up, yeah, but he shouldn’t have killed him,” said Barkhouse.

The revelation of a system of childhood rules and morals so different from adult beliefs has many local parents wondering about their children.

“What strikes home is: Do you really know your kids?” said Bornemann of the Whalley Mental Health Center.

Another parent, Murray Cottell, said the incident has made him and his wife re-evaluate how well they communicate with their 15-year-old daughter. “I think she was quite shocked” by the cover-up, he said referring to his daughter. But he added that, “but she’s not (really) surprised” at the incident.

Adult “norms need to be reinforced,” said Malcolm Klein, who’s also director of USC’s Center for Research on Crime and Social Control.

Bornemann has spent considerable time thinking about the events of the past year, and has come to at least one conclusion: “Kids need to be reminded about morals and values in life. They have to be reminded that I can’t come up and slug you like Rocky does on TV. It never hurts to keep repeating the basic values in society.”

Jennings, the teen-ager who finally went to police, said he still receives telephone threats accusing him of “ratting.”

For his part, George Tirone says he “never gave up. I always thought Shawn was alive until the day the police came to the door.”

Tirone, who is now unemployed and living in a motel in Penticton, B.C., a small lakeside resort town about 160 miles east of Surrey, issued a televised thank-you to Scott Jennings for defying the “no rat” rule.

As for the dual value system that allowed his son’s death to be concealed for so long, Tirone said: “Kids shouldn’t be on one side of the wall and adults on the other. We’re all living under the same sky.”