One Virginia teenager is useless, one other is injured, and a person is going through a cost of second-degree homicide, all as a result of a TikTok prank went terribly improper.
In accordance with Regulation & Crime, 27-year-old Tyler Chase Butler has been charged with second-degree homicide, malicious wounding and two counts of use of a firearm within the fee of a felony after he allegedly shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Bosworth Jr., who, together with two different teenagers, had been knocking on strangers’ doorways round 3 a.m. whereas recording movies of themselves performing “ding dong ditches” for TikTok. For these unfamiliar with “ding dong ditch,” it’s usually a sport youngsters have been enjoying for generations, the place they ring the doorbells or knock on the doorways of random residents, then run away as stated residents come to reply the door.
It was a sport that proved lethal as soon as the kids arrived at Butler’s house.
From Regulation & Crime:
In accordance with the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Workplace, deputies acquired a name round 3 a.m. Saturday a few house housebreaking in progress the place the resident fired photographs. After they arrived, cops discovered two teenagers affected by gunshot wounds. One, later recognized as 18-year-old Michael Bosworth, Jr., was rushed to the hospital the place he died.
The opposite teen suffered minor accidents and in addition was taken to the hospital. A warrant request filed in Spotsylvania Circuit Court docket and obtained by Regulation &. Crime says detectives spoke with the teenager who stated he was out with Bosworth and one other buddy pulling a well known prank during which folks ring a house’s doorbell earlier than operating away.
“The juvenile suggested it’s one thing that individuals are doing to placed on TikTok,” a detective wrote.
Per the warrant, the kids weren’t accustomed to the neighborhood and had achieved the prank on a few different doorways earlier than they got here to the fateful tackle on McKenzie Lane in Fredericksburg, some 60 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. The teenager informed cops they have been operating from the house once they have been shot at, the warrant stated.
Detectives additionally spoke with a 3rd teen, who was unhurt and corroborated the story that they’d been operating away once they have been shot at. The teenager additionally reportedly supplied the authorities with mobile phone video footage of the trio pranking different homes. The arrest warrant for Butler included a request to a decide to look “any movies, pictures or textual content communication reference to processing, making or having ‘Ding Dong Ditch’ movies.”
Now, for the elephant within the room: Butler is a Black man, and Bosworth was a white teen.
Predictably, these racial identities of the alleged shooter and the alleged sufferer, alone, has been sufficient to get people on social media buzzing in regards to the rights and wrongs of the unlucky capturing, with some calling Butler an outright assassin, and plenty of others declaring he had the appropriate to guard his house, and that he would have by no means been arrested if he have been a white man and Bosworth was a Black teen.
So, on one hand, there’s by no means actually a purpose to shoot at people who find themselves operating away from you. Alternatively, it was darkish; these teenagers have been enjoying a harmful sport in a wierd neighborhood at 3 a.m., and there, certainly, are people throughout America who would defend a white man’s proper to defend his house underneath the identical circumstances.
Both approach, one lesson that must be taken away from this story is that not each web development must be adopted. Be secure on the market, y’all!
