Dumb Kid Decisions

One of the challenges of parenting is trying to teach your kids to make smart decisions. We know from our own history that teenagers sometimes do things that absolutely baffle us ("what was he/she thinking!!"), and unfortunately, sometimes they pay a very high price. There are two such stories in today's paper.

First we have the daredevil skateboarder who tried to jump the tongue, or the hitch, between two trailers of a gasoline tanker:

At about 5 p.m. the teen saw a fuel tanker truck at the gas station next to the restaurant and tried to "leap the tongue," Buena Park police Sgt. Gary Worrall said.

"There is a link between the two trailers of the tanker truck, and it's about 3 feet off the road. He tried to leap over it on his skateboard," Worrall said. "The truck ran him over."

Jack went to UCI Medical Center in Orange where he died about an hour later.

The kid was probably a really good skateboarder, but made a fatal decision that not only cost him his life, but changed forever the life of the tanker driver who will have to live with the reality that he ran over a 14 year old - even if it wasn't his fault.

The other story is the ongoing saga of Ashley McDonald, the 18 year old Huntington Beach teenager shot by police. Her funeral was yesterday, and among the tributes from friends and family was this:

Police said MacDonald lunged at them with a bloody knife she had used moments before to slash her mother in an argument at their apartment. Officials said MacDonald refused to drop the knife.

MacDonald's supporters have demonstrated outside the Huntington Beach Police Department, criticizing the officers for their actions. The Orange County Sheriff's Department is investigating the incident.

Somehow I've managed to go through my entire life without even once slashing my parents with a knife. Call me unusual, but that's just the way I turned out.

The protesters who are trying to blame the Huntington Beach Police seem to conveniently forget the incident that proceeded the shooting, and can't or don't want to picture the scene of an enraged woman, holding a bloody knife, lunging at the officers. I'm sure the Ashley they think they know wouldn't do such a thing, but it happened nonetheless.

Both of these deaths could have been prevented - if the kids had just made a better decision.

By the way, as I was driving down the hill to my house a teenage kid skateboarded right out in front of me. He almost made tomorrow's paper.