by Rod Hughes

A 15-year-old San Carlos lad is what understating Costa Ricans would call “a problematic person.” He has been arrested by police 50 times so far this year for assaulting and robbing senior citizens and school kids in Ciudad Quesada north of the capital.

“He’s the person who causes us the most work in the the whole canton,” said Oscar Fonseca, chief of the San Carlos police, adding, “Sometimes we arrest him three times in the same day and that’s just too much!” Fonseca describes the one-person crime wave as well dressed and slender and never resisting arrest, which by now must seem as unremarkable as breathing.

Repeat offenders are known to every police department in the world but Fonseca’s Costa Rican patience appears to be wearing thin. The boy is also linked with car theft and, if getting into a locked car door defeats him, takes out his frustration by breaking the windshield with rocks.

The son of an alcoholic mother who was institutionalized, he was placed in a group home by social workers but ran away. Then the child welfare agency (PANI) tried to obtain psychological treatment for him but he resisted–persistently but never violently. (He has never hurt one of his robbery victims.) PANI is at a loss as to what more the agency can do for him.

He is well on his way to bettering the record of one older criminal we wrote about last year, arrested for the stabbing to death of a street person in downtown San Jose. Police booking him found that he had 399 prior arrests. And, yes, a Judicial Police spokesperson referred to him as “a problematical person.”