March 26, 2003 – A husband and wife visiting St. Thomas this week are unlikely ever to return. The woman was robbed at knife point Saturday night during intermission at the "Paradise on Ice" revue at the Mark C. Marin Center, and Tuesday she was attacked by a pack of wild dogs on the beach at Magens Bay.
"At this point I hate this island," Jane Boutineau said Wednesday, choking back sobs.
She and her husband Robert Boutineau, a retired New York City policeman, decided on the spur of the moment to escape the snow that has been dumped continually on the East Coast all winter.
Robert, who visited St. Thomas once before — back in 1964 — said his thinking was that "we'll just get away for a peaceful vacation."
The vacation has been anything but peaceful.
"Jane is still in shock from yesterday's attack," Robert said Wednesday, adding that she sustained eight to nine puncture wounds on her legs.
Three dogs lunged out of the bush at the couple at the western end of the beach. Robert said that at one point as he was fighting off two of them, he thought the dogs had "torn her leg off" as he watched helplessly.
Help was summoned after the attack, and Jane was taken by ambulance to Roy L. Schneider Hospital.
Next to having his wife injured and terrified, Robert said, the worst thing he experienced was a feeling that "it seemed nobody cared."
Allowing dogs to run free is illegal in the Virgin Islands, and yet the islands are rife with free-range canines.
Magens Bay employees have long known about the dogs, one of which turned up at the beach as a puppy about a year and a half ago. The small part-German shepherd — dubbed "Ghost" because he has been so elusive — was one of the three dogs that attacked Jane.
Bill Jowers, general manager of Magens Bay Authority, called both the attack and his struggle against stray dogs "terribly sad."
Jowers said he and his employees have trapped hundreds of dogs over the years and turned them over to the Humane Society of St. Thomas. But often, he said, he faces a problem other than the stray animals themselves: "People keep letting the dogs out of the traps."
Jowers is himself a dog lover. "I scrimped and saved to build a fence around my property to protect my dogs and to keep them from bothering other people," he said. He also said that he doesn't bring them to the beach, ever.
"People are trying to be kind, feeding the strays and letting them out of the traps," he said, but they don't understand the terrible problems that result from "caring for" these feral strays.
Jowers speculated that the reason for the attack on Jane Boutineau might have been the two dogs that joined the elusive German shepherd, making two alpha males and a female in heat.
The female, who is pregnant, was captured Tuesday, Jowers said, but the other two remain at large.
"In New York City," Robert Boutineau said, "we have a procedure. You get the dogs."
But that has never been easy in the Virgin Islands. The local livestock laws that prohibit animals from wandering loose are routinely ignored and almost never enforced.
In another incident last week, Jowers said, a woman was bitten by a stray dog while she was trying to capture one of them.
The high price of being nice
It may well be that Jane was still in shock from being robbed at knife point at the time that the dog attack occurred. Robert said her state Saturday night after the robbery was such that she didn't tell him what had happened until they were back at their hotel. That was when they called the police.
Jane had gone outside during the show's intermission to have a cigarette. She later related to her husband that she was approached by a white male in his 30s or 40s who told her that if she bought something from a particular vending machine, the money would go to charity.
"My wife is a very nice person," Robert said, "so she followed the man down some stairs."
But the vending machine didn't work, and the man wasn't interested in charity. Instead he told Jane he liked the diamond-studded heart necklace her husband had given her for Christmas and that he wanted it. He took it, her wedding rings, some other jewelry and $280 in cash.
Robert said his wife came back to the show just before it ended, saying simply, "It's all gone." In the hustle of getting to their car, out of the crowded parking lot and back to their hotel driving on the left side of the road, he didn't pay close attention to what she was saying.
"She was in shock," he said, but he didn't realize it.
Another concern Robert expressed about their experience with the robbery and its aftermath was that once the police arrived at their hotel, "I had to tell them what questions to ask."
The Boutineaus have been married for a year. Robert said they spent their honeymoon in Hawaii.
"I never feared animals until now," Jane said, "or people either."
Jane, who comes from New York City also, said, "I am a trusting person, " her voice trailing off, "You come to the island for a restful vacation."
She said what happened to her is "almost like a dream."
Not a good one.
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