Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I already have a video on YouTube with 87,963 hard earned views. This isn't just some cute little sneezing panda either. The video itself doesn't do justice to being there, nor does it tell the whole story so since I'm in a writing mood here it is, like it or not:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9yn1D9lllEWe were bored, average idiot high school guys stuck in-between clicks so we didn't really get to hook up with too many girls and we were too smart not to get involved with drugs or be consistently entertained by drinking like everyone else in our high school. Instead we aspired to do greater things while we were still under 18, mostly because these things were various well-planned out illegal stunts such as the above video.
Our first feat was pretty minor, ramping a few of my nitro-powered RC cars off some buildings, and turned out to be quite dissapointing, hence no video. I missed the ramp with the first car and totaled it against the short wall built to hide the rooftop pipes and HVAC units from the once loyal shoppers of an abandoned Win-Dixie. The second car I couldn't quite get up to speed because of the maze of pipes up there so the jump was not as spectacular as we had hoped. Despite the two story drop my faithful RC10GT was still running fine so we took it to a nearby church and tried running it down the long, insanely steep roof to a portable ramp I had welded but instead of a spectacular jump the slippery roof made me miss the ramp and all we got was a poor shot of an RC car doing a nose dive straight into the ground at around 35 mph. By then the cops were out and about (we could see them patrolling in front of the Win Dixie we were just at from the rooftop of the church) so instead of busting out our field repair kit and going for a second run we called it a night and went back to our field deep in the sticks of central Kentucky where we relaxed and did several experiments to prepare for the video you just watched.
A few things went wrong (or right depending on how you look at it) with the 100lb propane tank shoot. Even though stealing the tank was a perfect crime (the store had no idea it was missing and at first didn't believe us when we had to confess to them because there was no signs of breaking and entering and they had no records that showed anything was missing) we didn't consider in our plans what to tell the cops in the event that we got caught were we got the tank from. Second, we didn't Google Earth the location but relied only on the directions of a friend which we followed improperly. We had done reconnaissance on the site to make sure it was deep enough in the woods, the field was sufficiently big, that there was enough cover, we traced multiple exit routes from the location in the unlikely event of someone stumbling upon us, and made sure the hill was steep enough to catch the bullet and even took a hike over the hill just to be as sure as possible that a worst case scenario ricochet wouldn't end in disaster. What we didn't do was look
behind us in the opposite direction and see the house just beyond the next field, far enough to be concealed at night, but close enough to see the hill during the day or in the event of a burning Christmas tree followed by a 30+' fireball topped off with a twelve hour burning (according to the fire department) respectably sized flame.
The now famous line "There's people. We gotta go." was when we noticed house lights behind us and a truck cruising down the road toward our cars (there was seven of us so one vehicle wasn't possible.) What got us caught was the time it took us to get back to our cars. We specifically waited for a night with some sort of winter storm to prevent a field fire so the trip down the ice covered creek be was painfully slow; it was a general consensuses that we'd rather except what consequences would come having gotten to our cars too late than risk wrecking the truck and harming the five, unfastened passengers in the bed. Seriously, wear your seat belts kids. What they show you in school is nothing compared to the photos and newspaper clippings a couple kids and I found in fourth grade high up on a shelf of a state trooper's garage. Anyways, we were able to get back to our cars and get the hell out of there safely (our foresight to turn our cars around ahead of time paid off) because the gate leading up to the house was locked and the poor guy who had to deal with this wanted a face to face confrontation as little as we did. He had no idea it was just some bored highschool kids or if we had any other weapons so all he was intrested in was the license plate # of the car closest to the gate...
Well two weeks went by and we all thought everything was clear until we heard through a friend's friend's dad's police officer friend that the police were still interested in our case because they knew we were kids from a nearby high school since JOE forgot to clean out his pockets beforehand and dropped a school slip with a teachers name on it and they were afraid of us attacking the school next since they had no idea who we were and they had a partial on a red civic that happened to belong to one of us and also if they found us we were getting arrested.
Turn in time!
Even though we had all helped plan it out, we agreed that the two people most involved (those who stole the propane tank) turn themselves in first to see what happened. The police heard out our whole plan, precautions, and motive (boredom), talked to the school and found nothing but well behaved 4.0 students in good favor with all their teachers with not so much as a parking ticket and at a short preliminary hearing the judge determined that we were just idiot kids who made a mistake with no ill intentions and were smart enough to not pull any more stunts like that again. So out of the possible arson, wanned endangerment, trespassing, destruction of property and theft charges spread over two counties all we ended up with was splitting up the cost of the $180 propane tank to pay back the store, and the two guys that stole the tank got 70 hours of civil duty at the fire station because the judge thought they would still be pissed for driving out in the sticks at three in the morning then waiting twelve hours for the tank to die down.
Turns out after the whole story was told they thought it was kind of funny, were really nice since we are pretty respectful guys and signed off the 70 hours after only twenty because they really didn't want any volunteers to begin with and quite frankly didn't give a sh!t.
Out of the other five guys four never had their names mentioned and to this day their parents don't know what happened and mine only sighed and said it was my responsibility to deal with whatever came my way, which as it turned out happened to be nothing but a good life lesson and story to tell at parties.
That year we didn't even do a senior prank even though we were probably the most prepared group of friends in all of history. Through my work with maintenance I had master keys to every door in three schools in the county, knew how to shut off the power to the whole school by throwing two switches (a very clever combination that me and another maintenance guy discovered on accident), a close friend of mine through his own connections knew the alarm code to the main building, and two more friends of mine were network administrators for the county with remote control over every last computer and also knew exactly where all the video surveillance tapes were and had witnessed first hand how hard it was to actually get anything useful off of them.
In the spirit of South Park, I learned something today... respect your elders and don't be a dick because it really pays off. Also learn from your mistakes and when you do something stupid, don't do anything else stupid again because you don't get three strikes. And also if you do your homework on legal stuff, they can charge you with pretty much anything they want. We got seriously lucky in so many ways and even though it's a funny story now the stress of those three weeks wasn't worth it.
Two weeks after this whole event some smartasses who didn't respect their elders decided to egg a house and broke a window in the process. They were fined about $400 and did a full 70 hours community service in the mid-summer Kentucky heat.
I also know a guy who can't get his dream job, even though he is overqualified, because of a mistake he made in middle school. He was like us but the only favor he got was not going to jail after a mistake followed by a series of technicalities due to his bus route that racked him up five felonies. The court records were only conditionally sealed on his 18th, if he steals a candy bar the records open up again and he serves every sentence.
And lastly there is Ramsey, a typical college kid who got caught selling some dope and is now going to loose ten years of the best years of his life.
You guys should do an episode on something like this, I know Cartman went to jail once but the main focus of that episode was hate crimes. Get across to kids: don't f#ck with the legal system.
Thu Apr 03, 2008 4:19 am
) for Boobapolous.
