Jacob Currie never knew what he was capable of until he was the only thing standing between a robber, his family, and their lives.
The 14-year-old is being hailed as a hero after successfully disarming a would-be thief, who armed with a knife tried to hold up his family’s convenience store.
“I also had a nephew in the other room so I was pretty scared,” said Jacob, whose family owns and runs Abbie’s Corner Store in Nanaimo.
The teen recalls watching the man enter their store from the back-room where he can watch the store from a CCTV system.
“He looked after all of us in that moment and I’m so proud of him,” said the teen’s mother Karen Lack. “He’s our hero.”
Security cameras captured it unfold, when a man walked into the store with a ski-mask hiding his face, just before 9 p.m., Wednesday.
Knife in hand, the thief demanded that Jacob hand over the store’s money.
With his baby nephew laying just steps away behind the till, Jacob knew he had to stay calm.
Carefully, cautiously, he grabbed a baseball bat from behind the counter.
“Jake stepped back, grabbed the bat and said: What?!” recalled Marcel Trudeau, Jacob’s step-father. With a single swing, Jacob knocked the knife from the would-be thief’s hand.
Instantly the thief fled, without a penny, whining that “he hit me with a baseball bat,” Jacob recalled.
It’s the latest chapter in Nanaimo’s knife crime.
Another family owned store, Superette Foods, was robbed at knifepoint only days earlier, and even less time has passed since a man was fatally stabbed outside Port Place Mall.
Despite the recent hiring of extra constables and community safety officers, these are crimes that Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog says authorities can only do so much to keep up with.
“You think of the what if’s. What if something worse happened? What if Jake didn’t have it happen the way it happened?” said Lack.
Skye Ryan
