Feisty senior, 85, doesn’t back down against man, 31
When 85-year-old Helen Pelcis noticed a man pilfering her sorting trays at the Esquimalt Bottle Depot Monday, she loudly informed him the trays weren’t his to use.
And when the man responded by rushing forward and spitting in her face, Ms. Pelcis didn’t back down. “I was furious. In all my years I’ve never had that experience before and my dander was up,” Ms. Pelcis said. “I would have hit him with my cane if I’d had it.”
Instead, she hit him with a one-litre plastic pop bottle, batting him in the face several times.
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Ms. Pelcis said she learned her survival skills as a teenager in Berlin during the Second World War, when she had to knee a German soldier in the groin to escape peril. “Believe me you are faced with a situation that threatens your life, you learn how to fight.”