Schoolkid is bullied by another boy, who keeps stealing his Mountain Dew.
Kid decides to drink Mountain Dew and replace with urine.
Bully swipes bottle as usual, ends up with mouthful of p*ss.
Kid now faces lawsuit from bully’s parents :rolleyes:
First thought: excellent payback, thoroughly deserved
Second thought: courts are sadly likely to side with the bully
Third thought: maybe kid isn’t so innocent (could be he’s the bully and forced the other lad to drink the p*ss), which would change the story completely.
I’m not sure where this took place, but I gather from comments it’s in the UK.
Hmmm we don’t really have Mountain Dew here. Don’t tend to call principals that either, they’d normally be headteacher. So I don’t think it is in the UK.
We do have Mountain Dew - they sell it in Tesco and Sainsburys and lots of garage forecourts (it’s been rebranded as an energy drink).
Although the report is written in American it’s third-hand (friend of kid’s relative) so could easily have been passed across the Atlantic by phone/email and then summarised for Reddit by an American.
I would think Todd has the right to sequester his urine in whatever private receptacle he chooses. A competent, leak-proof (heh) bottle stored out of sight in a rucksack should fit that bill. He forced the contents of that bottle on no one. He also has no control over the relatively harmless, completely natural contents if they’re stolen.
If I was a judge I’d toss the case or rule for the defendant.
Some kind of endangerment or reasonable expectation of something or other, maybe. It’s hard to say if there’s any chance this lawsuit succeeds since we don’t even know where it’s been filed or what else happened in this situation.
Recent thread on boobytrapping food to screw with a food thief. The argument from the lawyers was that it’s probably actually a crime (not just a tort) to sabotage your own food, even if you just replace one food item with another similar looking one.
When I was in college, some guys that lived down the hall in my dorm were always getting care packages from their moms. There was another guy that always came in and helped himself to whatever they had in their room. The two roomies got fed up with the moocher and devised a plan to get him back. One of the moms had sent them a big box of jolly ranchers which the moocher loved. They decided to take one of the jolly ranchers, unwrap it. One of the roomies rubbed it all over his ass and then they rubbed it all along the inside of the sink in their room (which they used as their urinal and was utterly disgusting) They did this in front of a witness, wrapped the jolly rancher back up, marked it and placed it back in their candy bowl.
Several days pass until the moocher grabs the offending rancher, unwraps it, pops it into his mouth. The roomies bust out laughing, rolling histericallay on the floor. The moocher doesn’t know what’s going on, until the witness (the guy from across the hall) comes in and describes to the moocher, what they had done to the jolly rancher that was in his mouth.
Moocher proceeded to vomit right their on the floor of their room. One of the funniest things I have ever seen.
If it’s in the UK we have the same kind of laws as the US - i.e. that you can be punished for recklessly swapping out food items for “harmful” substances if you have a reasonable expectation that your victim will eat/drink it.
Clearly in the Reddit case the whole point of the exercise was that the bully would indeed drink it.
This guy was jailed after he added antifreeze to a bottle of coke to teach a mooching workmate a lesson… the recipient ended up permanently disabled as a result.
Yes, if you add an ingredient that’s likely to cause serious injury or death, then that would be a crime. But adding something that likely to be distasteful or cause temporary nausea shouldn’t be a crime. Is drinking urine likely to cause serious injury? I don’t think so.
If I was a judge I’d toss the case after fining the plaintiff for bringing it, add punitive damages for the theft, and (if it were within my power*) I would disbar the lawyer who dared to use the judicial system to try to take revenge on the initial victim as well.
His lawyer should build evidence of a history of Howard Hughes-style craziness, and posit that the kid was afraid of the commies stealing his precious bodily fluids.
Unless perhaps you have some kind of medical issue, which this kid might or might not have had - and may or may not have been aware of. I doubt urine is dangerous on its own. I remember from a biology class that urine is essentially the same as sweat, and when you get a little bit of sweat in your mouth, you don’t worry you’ve poisoned yourself.