.jpg)
.jpg)
Three years of hell in Orange's “Burnout City”
May 21, 2023
By Peter Holmes
It is only a matter of time before a hoon on a motorbike or in a car causes a catastrophic accident in Glenroi, says resident Denise.
Denise - not her real name - spoke to The Orange News Examiner on the condition she and the street she lived in weren’t identified.
Last Sunday afternoon - Mother’s Day - a sedan careened through her front yard in Glenroi.
She says the driver was attempting a burnout on her street but got it badly wrong and ended up skidding over the gutter and onto her rental property.
The car continued in an arc across the yard - narrowly avoiding three of her family’s cars - before clipping a letterbox and returning to the road and speeding off.
As the car spun out across the yard, Denise’s father was sitting in a parked SUV on the street.
A neighbour over the road who was walking to his bin went straight to check on Denise’s father, who was shaking.
For a few moments, Denise’s father thought the car was going to ram his vehicle. Later, as he was driving home to a village outside Orange, he had to stop half way, pull over and ask his wife to take the wheel, such was his level of distress.
Denise was inside the house, unaware of what had just occurred. “My son's stepfather was out the side of the house, he said he could hear the revving to get the wheels spinning, and he thought, ‘Here we go, another burnout’. Then he heard the clunk-clunk and as he got to the side gate he saw it going up the road.”
Her son ran inside the house: “Mum, come quick, pop’s freaking … then the guy across the road came and said, ‘Someone just nearly hit your pop, they were up on the yard’.”
Denise has multiple cameras stationed around her property.
"We went straight inside to look at the video recording and reversed it back. We were in shock. I’d just walked in, put my granddaughter down and put the kettle on.”
Not a few minutes earlier Denise had been in the front yard with her two-year-old granddaughter, who had been visiting her grandparents.
Denise had walked across the yard with her granddaughter from the SUV to the house, right in the pathway of where the vehicle lost control.
Denise was grateful that they weren’t in the yard a minute or two later, and also that the vehicle hadn’t continued straight after mounting the kerb, as she said it would have crashed into her bedroom where a cot is set up.
“And he’s lucky he didn’t hit the tree.”
Denise’s father had been offered use of the driveway, but had chosen to park on the street. Had he taken up the offer he would likely have been directly in the path of the out-of-control sedan.
While police say some crime is less prevalent during the winter months, Denise said this was not always the case with stolen bikes and cars.
“They probably come out more in the colder months because it’s their way of getting around. They use it to visit their mates.
“Some days it might start at 10:30, 11am, rev, rev, up and down. Then they’ll go somewhere and be back by 2pm, 2:30, cruising around.
“This morning at 3:30 there was a little car or a motorbike doing burnouts, revving everywhere. If you drive around you’ll see all the burnout marks on the road. My son said we don’t live in [Glenroi], we live in Burnout City.”
Police officers visited Denise late on the Monday night after the Sunday incident.
“They were great,” Denise said. “They couldn't believe it when they saw it.”
Social media is littered with people posting photos and video footage of people roaming the city in the middle of the night, checking out cars, side gates, front doors.
Denise says the names of some of the people allegedly involved in theft and joyriding are well known in Glenroi. Police have said in community meetings that there are a core group of young people that they - and the myriad community organisations in town - just can’t reach.
Denise has a theory: that in order to accumulate enough evidence to secure a conviction, police, “let them go and go until they get a lot of shit on them, then they arrest them, because if they get them for each individual thing they’re not going to get locked up for it. So it’s like the police wait for a whole heap of incidents, then they jump, so it sticks. But in the meantime we as a community are at risk”.
She says that recently a car driven by a friend of the family hit a man driving dangerously on a stolen motorbike around Sir Neville Howse Place; and that a few years ago a four-year-old girl playing in her front yard was hit by someone on a stolen bike and broke her leg.
“You never read about it in the media,” she said.
“I see it here. Cars come down the road and they think the boys on the bikes are going to stop for them. They’re doing wheelies and the cars have to avoid them because they won’t get off the road for you. One of them is going to hit a car or go straight through a house down the end of the road.”
Denise said key hotpots in Glenroi included Lone Pine Avenue, Kurim Avenue, Currong Crescent, South Terrace, Sir Neville Howse Place, Torulosa Way and Adina Crescent.
“It’s getting out of hand, and nothing is being done in this town. I don’t want the police to leave it now until something happens - someone’s killed or seriously injured.”
Denise said her street was part of a circuit in Glenroi that allowed motorbike hoons to ride through places that cars can’t navigate.
She said police had told her that, “they've kind of got their hands tied, because they can't chase them if they don't have helmets on. So this is why they can't do anything”.
“When we call them to say they’re roaring around here they say they’ll send a car, but you don’t see one for hours and of course they’re bloody gone by the time they get here.
“They’re not stupid. They’re not going to ride around here for an hour straight. They go up Lone Pine, down Kurim, down Currong, up through the bottom paddock, round Torulosa Way, Dairy Creek Road.”
Police say they have to prioritise jobs, and that they attend as soon as possible.
Orange has a high rate of domestic violence compared to the rest of NSW, and police here say they spend a lot of time attending domestic violence incidents, and checking that those who are under an AVO are not breaching it.
Meanwhile, Denise said she had noticed a new style of “home-made bike” that looks like a “tiny little Thumpstar [dirt bike]”.
“It’s got real big handles on it, and it looks a bit like a chopper.”
When Denise moved into her social housing property about three years ago, she was grateful and very happy. But now she wants out.
“[The Department of Housing] knows what it’s like up here,” she said. “It’s been hell for three years. When I first moved in here someone said, ‘If you have a problem come and see us’. She said everyone’s got a right to live in harmony.
“Maybe that’s why the people moved out from here before. Maybe it was too much and they couldn’t cope.”
Comments