Since laws are a thing of the past, a couple hundred teenagers simply picked a vacant house and threw a wild party Saturday night. They even had a DJ. Welcome to the wild, wild, west of Goodyear, Arizona.
Pirate a place to Party
Police say a “house party in Goodyear got out of control” Saturday night, February 19, when at least 200 teenagers “invaded a vacant house.” That’s putting it mildly. The next door neighbor charged with keeping an eye on the place “wants answers.”
He witnessed the whole thing and now he’s cleaning up the major mess. “Beer and liquor bottles were left everywhere,” Brian Franks notes. “Marijuana, cigarettes and pieces of broken glass are strewn across the lawn.”
The hooligans arrived with a full DJ setup, kicked in the door. and began “basically throwing a full on party.” The house is up for sale and the owner’s long gone, “so he was asked to look out for the property.”
Franks was alerted to the home invasion by his faithful canine companions. “I noticed, my dogs were barking, so I came back to investigate.” That’s when he got a big whiff of marijuana.
The house was wired up with those Ring cameras so he checked the video feed. It clearly showed “the three cameras getting ripped off the house.” Franks reported the party pirates to Goodyear PD.
“They tore the Realtor sign down, they took the one camera completely off, took the others put them in the up position,” Franks relates. “So, they were kind of incognito. They thought. But I was watching from the back corner.”
Cops made one arrest
Instead of sending in a major force, a couple of cops showed up at the front door and told the criminal squatters they were being evicted. The official statement from Goodyear Police notes “they broke up the party, took a criminal report, and made a DUI arrest.”
One unlucky person who weaved as they pulled away was made the sacrificial scapegoat and that will be the end of it.
When the switchboard at Goodyear PD started melting down with customer complaints, the department added it “will take some follow up to determine the host/organizer of the party.”
In other words, leave them alone until everyone forgets all about it. All appearances indicate things are going to get worse before they get much better.
Mr. Franks is “frustrated that more teens were not arrested and wants more to be done.” He’s not alone. “Allowing these kids to come into these houses, break in, allows these teens to say they can do it too.” Police have made it crystal clear that there isn’t a whole lot they can do to prevent pop up party incidents.
That means they can’t really stop other crimes of a more violent nature either. Especially with limited manpower and restricted funding. The obvious answer is vigilante groups. Goodyear neighbors who want to prevent things like this from happening again can band together and patrol the streets. Just like they did a hundred years or so ago, before law enforcement came along.
