27. David stands his ground by Tom Owers

David and I spent heaps of time together when we were at Muritai School. We liked to go skateboarding in Lower Hutt after school or at the weekends, and we stayed at each other’s houses quite often. We were inventive and liked doing new things, but we also got into trouble a lot.
 

I remember one occasion when we were in the old Queensgate and we wanted to get some basketball cards out of a vending machine. We would have been 12 or 13. We had some tweezers and we were trying to trick the machine into giving us the cards. Unfortunately we got apprehended by the police, thrown into the back of a cop car and taken to the Lower Hutt police station.
 

I was impressed at how David stood his ground when the police tried to belittle us, telling us we were losers and would get nowhere in life if we carried on the way we were. David tried to outshine the cops and made a statement saying he would make more money in his lifetime than they would ever make as policemen. I admired that spirit in David. Nothing set him back.
 

We were taken into a kind of holding cell and told to go into the opposite corners and face the wall. They then brought in a dog handler (without his dog) to try and scare us a bit. He was a big, stocky guy, but David wasn’t scared.
 

Eventually, they rang our parents and they came to collect us and take us home.