Halloween prank turns deadly

I was reading a story just a little while ago that really broke my heart. It happened pretty close to home too. Just down the road in Atlanta.

It didn't just break my heart. It made me mad too. Because it was senseless.





A 17-year old boy was shot and killed after he egged a mans car. The shooter has not been caught yet.

You'll have to excuse me a minute. I feel TWO rants coming on.

Rant #1

Why in the world would you ever resort to KILLING someone over your car? I just don't get that. Call the police. File a report. Press charges. Go to civil court to recoup the damages and get your car fixed. But to kill someone? That's just outrageous. And to make matters worse, the story I read said that the man fired 10 rounds. 10. That's beyond my comprehension. He just opened up his gun on a teenager over a car. A car. For someone's life. The two don't even come close to being equal. If you egged my car, keyed it all up and set it on fire in my driveway, I wouldn't kill you over it. (But Please don't come do those things to my car!) I would call the police though and let you suffer the consequences of your actions.

Rant #2

You know the saying "kids will be kids" right? Well to some degree that's the saying that goes through my mind when I think about this kid egging cars. He was just goofing around. Playing a Halloween prank. He probably didn't even know what kind of damage an egg would do to a car and now he'll never have the chance to learn that lesson. He gave his life for a little fun.

Here's where I get mad again.

Why do kids think causing damage to someone's property is fun? I'll tell you why I think they believe that. It's because some grownup, somewhere, sometime, told them that it was fun. Toilet papering the neighbors house. Egging things. Smashing pumpkins.

Mom, Dad, Uncle Henry, a neighbor or an older cousin who thought it was funny told them the story about when they were a kid and they did one of those things, laughing the whole time. "What a great time we had!"

I'm sorry but that just makes me sick. It's vandalism and vandalism is not ok or funny. If you are teaching a child that it is ok and funny then you are doing that child an injustice. Kids look up to us and learn from what we say and do. To me, teaching your child that it's funny to damage other people's things is right up there with teaching them that it's ok to make fun of people. It's wrong. Don't do it.

Maybe if the boy from the news story had been taught that it was wrong to damage people's property then he wouldn't have gone out egging cars and he would still be here to learn other life lessons. Sadly he wasn't and isn't.