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Monday, July 14, 2025

SEA crush at MovieTowne

by

20130509

Hun­dreds of ex­cit­ed and re­lieved SEA stu­dents de­scend­ed on­to Movi­eTowne, Port-of-Spain, af­ter their ex­ams yes­ter­day, seek­ing to take ad­van­tage of their new-found free­dom, snacks and even a movie.But what sound­ed like an easy and fun way to re­lax af­ter their big day turned in­to a push­ing and shov­ing match just to get a movie slip.

The movie lines were in­dis­tin­guish­able as ea­ger par­ents and guardians pushed their way through the crowds to buy tick­ets.Marc Mc Ken­zie, man­ag­er of op­er­a­tions, at­tempt­ed to dis­pense some form of crowd con­trol through the use of a bull­horn, as some par­ents were be­ing dis­cour­te­ous to oth­er cus­tomers–push­ing to get ahead."We're try­ing to con­trol the crowd a lit­tle bit be­cause they are get­ting car­ried away," Mc Ken­zie told the T&T Guardian dur­ing the melee.

A woman hold­ing her ba­by was al­most knocked to the floor be­cause of the row­dy crowd, Mc Ken­zie said.He said it seemed some par­ents were des­per­ate­ly try­ing to get ahead of oth­ers so they could ben­e­fit from the movie com­plex's SEA pro­mo­tion."This is an every-year sit­u­a­tion," he said.Mc Ken­zie said fail­ing to calm the crowd via the bull­horn, Movi­eTowne se­cu­ri­ty would be called to main­tain or­der, some­thing which had hap­pened be­fore.

"Last year we called out se­cu­ri­ty and locked it down a lit­tle bit. If af­ter all the pleas peo­ple don't seem to hear, we'll have se­cu­ri­ty stand up in front of each line and ush­er them," he said.By 2 pm, there was an es­ti­mat­ed 600 stu­dents, and the num­ber was ex­pect­ed to reach 1,500 by the end of the day.While Mc Ken­zie un­der­stood that stu­dents were ex­cit­ed, he said par­ents should set a bet­ter ex­am­ple.

"Par­ents want to re­ward their kids for their hard work and I could un­der­stand that full well, but they have to do it in a way where they are set­ting an ex­am­ple as well," he said.A stu­dent from Laven­tille Girls' Gov­ern­ment School said she was "over­whelmed" by the crowds.


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