Alleged Mailbox Bombers Arrested!

Police finally arrested the alleged Drano bomb makers, as cops in Horsham arrested two 12-year-olds for allegedly creating a bomb with a soda bottle and cleaner The Works. Looks like Drano isn’t as popular as it once was!

A guy at the U.S. Postal Service told the Courier Times those two kids could have gone to prison forever and ever: “If a death occurs, you’re looking at life.”

Nobody was killed, so fortunately the kids will only face 99 years or something.

Boys arrested in mailbox bombing [Bucks County Courier Times]
[Image via This Week in Milford]

Kids Using Drano Bombs Again!

NBC 10 told us a week or so ago that raves still existed, and now a fad from even earlier in the 1990s is apparently still around: Drano bombs! Okay, so “kids” and “blowing shit up” is a pair that’s been around for millions of years. Whatever.

The Horsham police are calling them “works bombs,” but that’s probably just a hip new term. “Works bombs” are a combination of tin foil and toilet bowl cleaner; the two mixes produce a gas which, when capped, will eventually explode.

Apparently kids in Horsham have moved on from knocking over mailboxes with baseball bats to blowing them up with bombs. Frankly, that shows some real dedication to chemistry. Maybe it’s for extra credit?

Update: It’s a crime wave! The bomb-in-a-mailbox prank has spread from Warminster to Upper Moreland to Doylestown to Horsham, The Intelligencer writes. And, please, be careful: “Police advise anyone who finds a soda bottle in a mailbox not to touch it and to call police immediately.”

Horsham Police Warn of Mailbox Pranks That May Prove Dangerous [KYW 1060]

The Best Sentence You’ll Read All Day

Police did not say how many mailboxes were damaged.

Moorestown police charge bridge commission chairman with driving while intoxicated [Burlington County Times]

Walkers Of The World, Unite

Daniel Rubin writes in the Inquirer about how they’re taking mailboxes from poor areas. Mailboxes where people send fewer than 25 letters a day total get axed.

How to stop this? Oh, you better believe it’s a coalition of old people:

If the boxes keep going the way of the Pony Express, a protest might be necessary. “You think they want Ma and Pa Kettle picketing in front of their office in walkers and crutches?”

Ma and Pa Kettle, famous community activists.

Update: Wait, crutches?? How is the removal of mailboxes break femurs?

Daniel Rubin | Postal boxes getting rarer [Inquirer]

Breaking: Bored Teenagers Are Destructive

If you haven’t spent much time in the suburbs (or, alternatively, haven’t seen Stand By Me), you might not be familiar with the teenage art of mailbox destruction. In the suburbs, there’s not much else to do besides hang in basements and drink in the woods, so people come up with ridiculous games to play. One of them is going down a street and destroying mailboxes, with cherry bombs, baseball bats, rabid wolverines, whatever.

The Bucks County Courier Times has a big article about teen vandalism today, noting that it picks up in the summer because kids don’t have to go to school. It also notes that most kids don’t know why they destroy mailboxes and blah blah blah.

There’s also this sentence: “While there is only one way to throw an egg, there apparently are several ways to destroy a mailbox, according to police reports detailing the destruction.” Oh, come on — hasn’t this guy ever heard of an egg catapult?

Teen vandalism can come with high cost [Bucks County Courier Times]
[Image from the comic strip Gil Thorp]