Assault with a weapon for throwing objects at pedestrians

Thunder Bay Police Const. Barry Ritch knows first-hand how it feels to have an object thrown at him from a moving vehicle.
“It happened right at the station,” Ritch said about an incident that happened to him about five years ago. “I was jogging before I start my shift and a beer bottle was thrown at my head.”
Ritch said a similar incident had just happened at a bar so the police were able to track down the suspect and charge him with assault with a weapon.
“He ended up going to jail,” Ritch said. “He wrote an apology letter from jail to me, which is fantastic.”
Although the beer bottle didn’t hit him, Ritch said the intent was there to hit him with the bottle. He said an object thrown from a vehicle travelling at 50 kilometres per hour plus the average person’s throwing speed of about 20 kilometres per hour will add up to “a lot of velocity.”
“At first I was very upset,” Ritch said. “I couldn’t believe this could happen to me. Yes, I was a victim. Although it didn’t hit me, it still upset me very much. What did I do to deserve this?”
Thunder Bay Police have encouraged people who have objects thrown at them from moving vehicles to report the incident quoting incident number P11027242.
“Egg throwing or incidents like this happen in any city,” said Goyce Kakegamic, education coordinator for KO Secondary School Services. “The secret is that you got to report it. Call 911 and report it because that should not be tolerated. No one deserves that kind of treatment.”
KO Secondary School Service’s Leona Rae recently reported an egg-throwing incident to police that happened to her and her boyfriend this spring on Memorial Avenue in Thunder Bay.
“He usually walks close to the road — he doesn’t like me walking on that side — good thing I guess,” Rae said. “We were walking and all of a sudden these two vehicles drove by real fast, so fast I couldn’t see their faces or their licence plates or anything. All I heard was him yell out in pain and he was covered in yolk.”
Rae said some of the egg yolk also splattered on her, but her boyfriend got the worst of it.
“He actually got bruised just from the impact of the egg,” Rae said. “We kind of felt embarrassed and angry. He was so mad he was going to stand there and wait for them to come back.”
Rae said the police thanked them for reporting the crime, even though they couldn’t offer much information about the people who threw the egg.
“We couldn’t say what the guys looked like, what kind of vehicle they were driving,” Rae said. “It all just happened so fast.”
Rae said some KO Secondary School Service students have reported similar incidents.