Mom Arrested After Son Makes Dry Ice "Bombs"

formfeed writes "Police were called to a house in Omaha where a 14-year-old made some 'dry ice bombs' (dry ice in soda bottles). Since his mom knew about it, she is now facing felony charges for child endangment and possession of a destructive device. From the article: 'Assistant Douglas County Attorney Eric Wells said the boy admitted to making the bomb and that his mother knew he was doing so. The boy was set to appear Tuesday afternoon in juvenile court, accused of possessing a destructive device.'" She's lucky they didn't find the baking soda volcano in the basement.

Comments

Sounds familiar.

[Leebert]

This lets me tell one of my favorite stories (which probably isn't all that funny.)

I have a friend who is a physicist. He was hanging around with his brother, who worked at a bookstore. They were doing essentially the same thing, but with liquid nitrogen, behind the store. After one particularly loud bottle explosion, they went back into the store, only to hear a loud pounding on the door shortly thereafter.

Opening the door, they were faced with a Baltimore County police officer, who demanded an explanation. My friend started to explain: "Oh, it's OK Officer, I'm a physicist..." As if that explained everything. Which, to be honest, probably does.

I make that joke more often than you could imagine at the physicists at work.

But in all seriousness, this continues what I've been calling the "war on curiosity". Recently, I accidentally picked a flight that had a stopover (that's what I get for clicking through the website too fast.) So while I was bored and waiting on the plane, I wandered up next to the front row of seats and peered into the cockpit. I was there for a minute or so, until the flight attendant came up in a fairly huffy attitude, and told me that I couldn't congregate in the front of the plane. Which was on the ground. With the engine shut off. With the wheels chocked. And the pilot sitting in his seat.

I'm afraid anymore to walk to the end of the platform and look down the subway tunnels. I'm afraid to take pictures of bridges. I'm afraid to be just plain curious, because it's apparently abnormal and suspicous. It's getting ridiculous. And it's going to come back and bite us in the butt.

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Wonko the Sane]

I'm afraid anymore to walk to the end of the platform and look down the subway tunnels. I'm afraid to take pictures of bridges. I'm afraid to be just plain curious, because it's apparently abnormal and suspicous. It's getting ridiculous. And it's going to come back and bite us in the butt.

You say this as if it is an unintended, rather than intended, consequence of how our society is organized.

Re:Sounds familiar.

[xaxa]

"An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one." — George Mikes.

I reckon an Ankh-Morporkian can congregate alone, but my national stereotypes aren't up to picking a real nationality for it.

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Nadaka]

The war against American intellect is not affected by any outside foreign power as far as I can tell, unless of course you count the Vatican and they are at best a minor player. No, it waged internally be people who's power base relies on people not asking questions and just doing as they are told. It is domestic conservative and religious organizations that are poisoning the American spirit and sapping the will to learn from the people.

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Svartalf]

Lest one think of me as doing a projection of things...

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent."
-John Dewey

“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed customs. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
-William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889-1906.

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
-William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889-1906.

“Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly.”
-Stuart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind, 1948.

"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."
-Justice H. Walter Croskey, 2008.

Both sides are very guilty of fostering their agendas and neither side of that crowd is going to be at all helpful towards the American Intellect; and it's been ongoing for a long, long time if you look at the comments from Harris and Dewey.

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Wonko the Sane]

To a large degree the war was started by (mostly) well meaning people at the end of the 19th century who had just lived through the Industrial Revolution and concluded that interchangeable, standardized humans would revolutionize society (for the better) in the same way that interchangeable, standardized components revolutionized manufacturing. Back then the 20th century's two biggest examples of progressivism, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had not yet seen the light of day. This is back when most people believed in a neat, orderly universe created by the watchmaker god. All living things could by precisely classified into a uniform hierarchy. Their view of the universe did not allow for chaos, quantum physics and ring species. As it turns out, they were wrong but the less-well meaning elements certainly aren't going to let go of the power without a fight (or a collapse).

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Bayoudegradeable]

A buddy of mine and I were doing the same dry ice thing a few years back. Just good old curiosity. What the heck is gonna happen if we drop dry ice, water and seal up the two liter? Honestly, it's a MUCH bigger bang than I would have thought. The top and fragments were sent all over the driveway. So after the third ones the neighbors called, and we realized it was time to stop : ) I do remember thinking that something like this, packed with the wrong stuff inside could cause some trouble. I guess, in a strict sense, it is a bomb after all. Side note... taking pictures of oil refineries, oil pipelines in south Louisiana (pre-spill, mind you, post 9/11) will get you harassed quickly by local law enforcement. I remember telling one officer, "You know, this used to be a free country." Instead of getting irate he began the "hey look, just doing my job" routine. He then went on to talk about all the press restrictions and lock-down procedures they have if an accident or attack were ever to happen at an oil processing facility. It's sad how much money, effort and energy is wasted on keeping us "safe" from terror.... I mean think about it; what did OBL and company spend in bringing down the twin towers? What have we spent since? What have we "gained" in the war of terror? In terms of dollars to outcome; we have lost. Terribly.

Re:Sounds familiar.

[interiot]

And if the cops ask you to delete photos, play along, because recovering the deleted photographs is trivial compared to what can happen when arguing with a cop.

After the cop leaves, swap out the memory card for another. Make sure you set the card aside and don't take any more pictures on it, because taking new pictures could potentially overwrite some of the deleted data. When you get home, download and run PhotoRec (it's GPL/open source, available on multiple platforms, and runs almost without regard to what the underlying filesystem is).

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent."
-John Dewey

A quote deliberately removed from context and sensationalized by Ann Coulter, of all people.

Dewey also said this about education: "To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests."

Hardly reconcilable with Coulter's intended misinterpretation of that first quote now, isn't it?

Re:Sounds familiar.

[Jerf]

I hate to say this, but: this. It isn't conservatives, it isn't liberals, it isn't even anything that would be today recognized as "progressive", because all political philosophies have shifted so far in the past hundred+ years as to be unrecognizable.

What it is is a hundred-year-old meme program still running in an environment that falsifies every underlying assumption the program is built on, and until we flush it out of our system, we're not going to have any radically different results.

I strongly recommend The Underground History of American Education. You do not have to agree with the author's prescription to understand and agree with the diagnosis, which I find well-researched.

Education is dangerous

[grimsnaggle]

Society needs to figure out that it can't have it both ways. You can't desire educated kids without giving them the freedom to explore, particularly so long as the damage they do is limited to their own lives and property. Alpha double plusses require a large bottle, right?

A baking soda volcano is nothing...

[KarrdeSW]

The kid was probably plotting to wire a case of mentos and coca-cola to drench his neighborhood in sudsy death...

Re:Just noisy

[EvanED]

You can do it harmlessly, but by point of contrast, a couple kids in my high school did that, and actually hurt a teacher who got hit by shrapnel.

Re:Hyperbole or stupidity

[Cookie3]

Back in 1999, a teacher at my High School was injured because a kid thought a dry ice bomb in a trash can would be a "funny" prank. I don't know how much dry ice was placed in the soda bottles -- I suspect they were 2L bottles -- but he put several bottles of dry ice in different trash cans around the school:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4179/is_19990402/ai_n11719980/

It's not mentioned in the article, but the teacher did suffer lacerations on his face -- an inch or two to either side, and he might have actually been blinded.

I don't see how you can not call it a bomb. It's a device that explodes. Improperly placed (or designed), and it can hurt innocent bystanders. Putting dry ice and water in a sealed bottle can *ONLY* result in an explosion. What else would you call it?

Re:Hyperbole or stupidity

[ground.zero.612]

So dry ice in a plastic soda bottle constitutes a "bomb" these days? I mean, I suppose you could "put an eye out" with it, but it's not really what I would call a "bomb". Are the police just stupid, or is the prosecuting attorney delving into hyperbole?

When I was 13yo I had a friend in middle school that had recently returned from an out of state 4th of July vacation, and came home with a ton of illegal-in-my-state fireworks. I convinced him that it would be a great idea to bring a backpack full to school so we should shoot them off.

Suffice to say that he did bring them, and we skipped the last class of the day and ventured out to the track and field long jump pit. Then, in a blaze of glory we lit off a backpack full of m-80's, black-cats, whistlers, smoke bombs, etc. Just about the time our hearing was returning, we noticed that all 4 grade level principals were rushing us.

At the end of the day, we were yelled at by 4 school principals, 1 school superintendent, 1 county sheriff, 1 deputy sheriff, 4 city police officers, the city bomb squad, the county SWAT unit, the fire chief, the paramedics, and last but not least our parents. I had to pay $400 to sit through a 6hour juvenile delinquent rehab seminar.

The best part is that my poor friend cried the whole time, while I laughed almost hysterically. Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this story: when I my father was 13yo, his neighbor had a son the same age, and they would often go hunting and fishing, and exploring together. The neighbor would often give his son and my father a crate of dynamite and simply tell them "you boys be careful, now!"

The think-of-the-kids mentality is almost solely responsible for this pussification of the USA. Won't someone think of the adults!?!?

Talk Back

[D66]

Criminal Division
1701 Farnam Street
Hall of Justice, Suite # 100
Omaha, NE 68183
(402) 444-7040

In situations like this, public outcry and shame against those who infringe on freedom is a useful tool. Shame is underutilized as a form of social change. We should change that and complain to anyone connected with this charge. Loudly. So rather than posting here impotently, Call the Douglas County Attorney's office and state that this charge is an assault freedom