Ex-NFL player Brian Holloway, who played for New England and Los Angeles (or…Oakland?), has a vacation home in upstate New York. Over Labor Day weekend, 300-400 kids showed up and had a big party in the home, trashing it. They tweeted as they went, of course. Holloway’s son found out about it as it was going on and the family “watched” the event unfold from their home in Florida, via Twitter. The cops did show up.
Holloway says in the above story that he has about 300 names already. He seems pretty classy - he’s got 8 kids himself and is worried about the path these kids are on. He’s posted the tweets on a Web site http://helpmesave300.com/ to help identify the kids.
Now it seems that the parents of some of the kids are pissed because Holloway is ruining their chances of getting in to college or some shit. They want to sue. Wow!
Or maybe they see a guy who is an ex-NFL player with a vacation home who isn’t going apeshit over $20k in damages to said home, and thinking “Huh, this guy has money to blow! Let’s get some!”
Pretty crazy story. Surprised I haven’t heard much about it but actually glad I haven’t heard much about it as there is much more important news anon.
It’s a nasty by product of social media. Hey! Theres a party at 123 Elm Street and 200 kids show up with drugs and booze. Mom and dad’s house gets trashed.
This situation was even worse because they broke into a stranger’s house and threw a party. 20 grand in damage.
I just watched a video of a news report, and they show a photo of a girl in a car holding an eagle’s head statue (so, apparently driving away from the party with it). The statue was from the grave of Holloway’s dead (stillborn) grandson. One of the many stolen items from the house, but the most important thing they want back. Cripes!
I wonder if they can tie all these things into a conspiracy charge? Probably not actually worth doing, but if there’s an ambitious prosectuor looking for headlines these kids present a great opportunity.
I’m sure it will. People like to think the internet makes them so annonymous, but it cuts both ways- people will probably easily be recognized in video footage. The world is much more interconnected.
Restitution and 75 hours community service is probably the most constructive punishment.
Let them work off the time cleaning vandalized property, cleaning parks, picking up litter, and helping the elderly. They need to learn respect for property.
Holloway is being way too nice. I’d be pressing charges against every single kid, and their parents. Counter-sue any asshole who objects and brings a suit about the photos. Crush them and dance on their bones.
I’d offer this as a fair trade. For any parent that wants their kid removed from whatever he’s doing (it sounds like he just wants them to come back and help him fix the place and maybe embarrass them a little bit on his website that 12 people might see, and stay for the picnic) he just hands over their name to the police. It won’t be on his website but the police will do what they do with it. They’ll get tickets, a court date, a public record (which is probably on a website). They probably get community service as maybe some kind of AODA classes as well.
Trust me, their college choices are going to hurt much less this way then the ‘official’ way, and even less if they don’t get trash someone’s house.
Maybe it is time for some to fall down to the bottom and spend their whole life coming back up.
Why not? What’s so special about these kids that they get a pass from justice?
I’m going off on a tangent here but, it seems, that I don’t think they would break and enter if they knew there was someone in the house with an assault weapon.
With no proper settling of this criminal act in terms of handing out proper sentences to all involved, the only way to protect one self and property is to own a gun and know how to use it.
I can totally see this line of thinking of an average American.
I’m sure most of the kids didn’t know it was breaking and entering; they just got a text about a sick party and went over and had a few beers. The few who deserve to have long-term consequences . .errr . . . deserve to have long term consequences. By the law of averages there are also several who need rehab; why not let this be the catalyst?
My point is that there are probably about 10-15 kids who need to be saved, and another 300-odd for whom the public shaming is exactly the right treatment.
There is no one who deserves to take money from the victim, and I hope those parents who made noise about suing get publicly shamed as well. (I am sure they will try to argue that the empty house constituted an “attractive menace”. Which is legalese for “the slippery slope that started the nightmare of irresponsibility and over-litigation throughout the USA.”)
(bold mine)
I wonder if it’s the opposite, and the owner on his site tend to agree. He states things can be repaired, his interest is in the ‘children’, not the property.
I do wonder if what these ‘children’ did is a normal human reaction to a set of circumstances imposed on them. When people are pushed too hard in one direction they can rebel in the opposite. Young adults, teenagers, who are legally still treated as children are thus restricted, this does not agree with their age, and sometimes something has to give.
I’m not saying that such a thing is right, but where the ‘wrong’ is may be deeper then we realize and the ‘wrong’ may very well be us and the society we have imposed on them.
The link said that one parent and one kid came back to help clean up. (I’m assuming they are mother or father and child.) That kid, yeah, should maybe get a break.
The parents who want to sue because it will hurt their kids’ college chances should consider this: if their children act in this way in high school, how are they going to act in college, with even less parental supervision? And maybe their kids are minors now, but in college, when they’ll be 18 or over, any trouble with the law will be a lot worse.
Do you even remember being a teenager? Many kids (the majority) would have gone along with something like this. That doesn’t mean they would initiate it. Mob psychology, especially in teens, is a well-documented phenomenon. People do things in a group that they would never do alone. I don’t think you can court-order kids not to hang out in groups of people larger than 30.
You may think you’re above it, but you can never know how you’d behave until it happens to you.
So are you saying that if you’re in a group of 30 or more you you’re allowed to trash a house?
Don’t get me wrong, when person number 236 showed up at the party it’s hard to charge her with trespassing (or anything else along those lines). She has no idea who’s house it is or that it was broken into. But when there’s a picture of her doing a keg stand and video of her throwing a vase through a window she still deserves to get in trouble…mob psychology or not. She needs to learn that when shes in college and 15 of her drunk dorm mates are chanting " DO IT DO IT" maybe she should just take the lighter away from the curtains and say “No, YOU do it, I don’t want to get in trouble”. Just because there’s a whole bunch of other people around it doesn’t mean that what you do doesn’t have consequences. That’s the whole point of mob psychology. It feels like you can do anything and get away, but you have to learn that it isn’t the case.
Also, whether or not you can court order someone to not hang out in groups of thirty or more would be questionable, but you can court order them to not have a drop of alcohol or drugs until they’re 21 (for alcohol), and I’ll bet you can have the courts take away their access to social media if the same group of kids kept getting into these same situations. That is, if 3 weeks later the broke into another empty house and had another big party and next summer they did it again…Take away their access to social media and these parties would die out pretty quickly.
Well, I am 70 now but I do remember my teen years quite well.
I was a good little Catholic boy. Bawahahahaha
We did not waste our time with silly stuff like this, it would just get us in trouble.
We knew we were doing wrong so we did not get caught.
By the time I was 13, my parents had already proved to me what would follow me all my life.
Sounds like a lot of kids have not been raised properly.
As a teen, did you ever have to make the decision to go or not go with the crowd? Was it hard? How much were you drinking? What have you taught your kids about this?
If the parents can not be prosecuted for their underage kids crimes, then they really should have raised their kids better. The kids should have major consequences either way IMO.
What ages are your children if you have any, and if they were a part of this had happen, would you claim snowflake privilege?
