Stupid games

There's an anger in this world that you can almost feel in the air when you read stories like this one.

I'm sure that Mr and Mrs Og, the first cave dwellers who put a door on their antre, were bothered when the troglodyte kids from down the street knocked on that door and ran off to invent fire or something.  The Ogs went to the door, found out they had been pranked, and were angry for a second, and then went back to painting pictures of mammoths on the cave walls.

Something is wrong when such a prank, stupid as it is, turns out fatal, but it happened the other day in Southern California, where a man chased after a carload of kids who had played ding-dong-ditch on him and rammed their vehicle.  Three of the six boys in the car were killed.

The six buddies had been on a sleepover when one of them came up with the idea of jumping into someone's pool or ringing someone's doorbell and hightailing it out of there. Dumb ideas, but they should have been harmless as well.

Sergio Campusano, 18, was the oldest of the crowd, and he was driving them around in a Prius. He survived, as did two other guys. Drake Ruiz, Daniel Hawkins, and Jacob Ivascu were all killed when a car driven by Anurag Chandra, 42, a resident of Corona CA, about 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The carload of guys apparently picked a house at random and one of them rang Chandra's bell.  I'm sure they did not expect an enraged man to barrel out of the house and chase them down in his own car.

“He got really close and I was like, What is this guy doing?” Campusano told NBC4. “And I felt like a nudge forward like he hit me from the back and I was like, There’s no way he just did that… like, this guy is insane.”

Campusano said that when the man rammed their car from the side, he thought, "If anything happens, I love these guys.”

“He just got next to me and I was confused. What is he going to do?” Campusano said. “I just saw him ram his car into my back. And I whipped into my window and I blacked out and then I remember I woke up on the floor. I don’t remember how I got there. I was shaking."

The teens' car had collided with a tree, killing the three 16-year-olds. Chandra fled the scene, but witnesses followed him to a nearby house, where he was arrested, and charged by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office on three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. The DA’s office also filed a “special circumstance allegation of multiple murders” against him.

The three victims

Our lives are filled with minutes, and inside all of those minutes are crossroads and choices.  Some choices are obvious; when we're cutting a sandwich in half, we understand that we could do serious damage to ourselves if we deliberately use the knife on our fingers or arms. 

But you can be sure that if any of the seven people involved in this horror had their choices to make over again, things would be far different for all of them now.  That's why it's important to stay in the moment and choose wisely, to avoid a lifetime of sorrow.