Gertie leads ‘fury’
By Trudy Beyak
Oct 19 2006

Her dad always told her to stand up for what she believes and Gertie Pool made it her lifetime theme.

The slender, white-haired, 70-year-old Christian woman is a street fighter known for standing up for justice to help abused women and children.

She is pure compassion.

I’ll never forget the night this small, frail-looking woman faced a room full of steely-eyed, angry lawyers in Clearbrook.

One by one, the men took turns blasting Pool for daring to give the infamous racquet award to Justice Harry Boyle.

If you’ll recall, the judge decided not to give Darrel Adam Ursel any jail time after he had sexually assaulted an Aldergrove woman in 1996 with a racquet for an hour and a half.

It was a brutal attack and the sentencing injustice infuriated women across B.C.

But, not these lawyers.

No, they were mad at Pool’s audacity to question the judge’s lenient sentence and they tried to intimidate the little courageous woman standing in front of them.

You’d have thought, by their outrage, she had committed the crime.

Instead, Pool had used her creativity to come up with a racquet award for the judge and women clapped their hands in support across the country.

Pool stood tall and unfazed, looking directly at each of the two dozen lawyers in that room as she questioned them in her quiet voice: “What if the victim had been your wife? What if the victim had been your daughter? What about the victim? What about her?”

She would not be moved.

It was a priceless moment to observe.

About eight years ago Pool was diagnosed with breast cancer and I wondered if we’d heard the last of our Gertie.

But the courageous Abbotsford woman not only beat cancer, she continued her letter writing campaign to uphold justice for victims of crime.

This week the street fighter appeared once again in a big way on the public scene as the leader of the “Furious Grandmas.”

Pool is angry the Canadian justice system allows serial sex predators like Peter Whitmore free on the streets to victimize young children over and over again when it’s known that pedophiles are incurable.

It is righteous anger.

Using her enterprising spirit once again, she helped organize a group of women in Abbotsford and now the “Furious Grandmas” are ready to storm Ottawa to convince the government to change the law and legislate mandatory jail sentences for pedophiles and other sex offenders.

“We need to protect our kids,” Pool said with passion.

When Pool worked as a nurse she said she saw little girls come into the hospital to undergo reconstructive surgery, because of the brutalities inflicted upon them by sex predators.

“It was really hard on me to see what these guys did to little girls; these people are sick, what they do is just evil, she said.

“We should never allow pedophiles the freedom to keep hurting our little children, our innocent grandchildren.”

Yet, incredibly, 44 per cent of convicted deviant sex offenders in Canada today have never served a day in jail.

Shouldn’t we all be “furious”?

-Trudy Beyak is an award-winning reporter at The Abbotsford News, a sister paper to The Star, owned by Black Press.

© Copyright 2006 Aldergrove Star