A Crime to be Old?

I don't want to sound like a columnist for the "Daily Mail", but feel that I must comment upon the light sentencing of the two teenage killers of the late  Ekram Haque, 67, who was attacked in August 2009 in Tooting as he left a mosque with his 3 year old grand-daughter. He died from his injuries a week later. His killers,
Leon Elcock, 16, and Hamza Lyzai, 15, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in June at the Old Bailey.
Elcock was detained for four-and-a half years and Lyzai for three-and-a-half. That's 8 years between them. Not much of an exchange for the death of an innocent man, a small child traumatised and a family devastated. Both Elcock and Lyzai will be back on the streets before their 21st birthdays. No wonder Mr Haque's son Arfan, 35, said outside court: "I thought justice has not been served today. I have been really let down." In that, I must agree - in fact, we have all been let down.
    But there is another, more sinister, angle to all this: Elcock, with another youth, had taken part in another attack on old people, and was on bail for this offence when he killed Mr Haque. It seems that a couple in their 70s, Jasumati and Jushbhai Patel, asked the boys not to sit on their wall, and were then punched and stamped upon in their own home.For youths like Elcock, then, the elderly are fair targets for violence. This is worrying, because, even among the more violent tearaways that I knew in my youth, thuggery against old people was regarded as contemptible and cowardly. Elcock and his ilk do not seem to subscribe to this belief. Perhaps they see being old as a greater crime? Photographs of individuals can tell a story - if not the whole story. The photographs of Elcock and Lyzai below suggest a story to me - one without a happy ending.