ROTHENBURGER – Security guard lives in limbo long after Victoria Street West incident
(Image: CFJC Today file photo)
‘IT HAS NOT BEEN an easy year,” says Rick Eldridge as we sit in a downtown coffee shop.
He wears a Ronik Security ballcap and jacket; his hair and beard look longer and whiter than the last time we spoke.
It’s been a year and a half since a viral Facebook video caught him confronting a belligerent street character on Victoria Street West, an incident that changed his life.
He was working security on the street for a different company and had asked the man to move along. Things got physical; Eldridge said at the time he was defending himself.
Though some admired him for it, he lost his job and his security licence over it, and his car became his main home. Eventually, he got his licence back and job offers came in but then, months after the incident, RCMP belatedly recommended an assault charge against him.
Though he was hired by Ronik and is currently doing the graveyard shift at a downtown bank that’s under renovation, he describes a life in limbo, marked by frequent court appearances due to the assault charge.
Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, and publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
If this man is telling the truth about the street then our mayor better get together a group of folk like him as an advisory committee and forget every other approach that has so far failed to do anything except increase the homeless in our streets. Let’s have our committees made up only of those with lived experience. Seems to me that that’s the only way we’ll get down to the roots of the solution.
I like your way of thinking, Ian.
We need to remember that the three incumbents voted against Denis Walsh’s motion to look at a different location and have a different approach to this social issue.
The problem may just be the arrogance of the people in charge that fail to account/consult/involve for the “lived experience”…but I agree with your thought Ian.