How to return a parking ticket and get arrested for terrorism

This is one of those stories that almost make you wonder if the people in it weren’t just totally stoned off their asses to make such insane judgments. It all started when a Purdue University, Indiana, student received a parking ticket and had a wheel lock placed on his parked car for apparently displaying a parking permit that wasn’t his. Okay, a bit foolish of him, but permissible. Unfortunately, Parking Services wasn’t open yet, so rather than wait around pointlessly, the student instead packed the parking ticket, the money fined and the wheel lock in a box, which he left outside the Visitor Information Center.

You’d think everything was fine … until Purdue Police absolutely freaked out, arresting the student on preliminary charges of “terroristic mischief”, evacuating the building and bringing in a portable X-Ray machine to scan the package and make sure it wasn’t a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Seriously.

According to a press release, around 7:50 a.m. Thursday, three college-aged men left a suspicious box in a hallway at the center, located at 504 Northwestern Ave. Police evacuated the building and used a portable X-ray machine to examine the box’s contents. Inside of the box there was a wheel lock, a Purdue parking ticket and $20. Police re-opened the center at 9 a.m.

“Everything is fine,” said University spokeswoman Jeanne Norberg. “They evacuated the building, X-rayed the box and discovered that it had the wheel lock and a parking ticket and $20.”

Police arrested 21-year-old Roy C. Sun of Andover, Mass., on preliminary charges of Class C felony terroristic mischief and possession of stolen property, a Class C felony.

Norberg confirmed Sun is a senior in the College of Engineering.

[…]

Terroristic mischief is when a person knowingly or intentionally places a device with the intent to cause a reasonable person to believe it is weapon of mass destruction, according to the press release.

Seriously? A WMD, at Purdue? Are these twits completely off their rockers?

Look, here’s the thing. The point of a terrorist act, with an actual WMD, is to cause as much devastation, pain and panic as possible – hence, to terrorize people. Terrorists want to attack high-value targets, landmarks of crucial or symbolic importance – the White House, the Pentagon, the Statue of Liberty, and so forth. There would be no point in attacking a place like Purdue University. As Jen (who is a student there herself) says, the box was left “in a tiny building on [a] relatively insignificant college campus in the middle of a corn field”. The idea that there is even the slightest risk of a terrorist act occurring at a place like Purdue is nonsensical. Anything resembling a WMD there can only be a prank, so there is no rational reason for anyone to break out in cold sweats at the sight of a package there.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be at least slightly wary of unmarked packages left seemingly at random in a hallway; there is always the risk that it could indeed be something nefarious or dangerous. But to evacuate the entire building, and especially to arrest someone and charge them (if only preliminarily) with “terroristic mischief”, all for a single package, seems just short of calling in the SWAT team as far as overreactions go.

Anyway … Roy Sun, the accused student, hasn’t officially been charged yet, though considering some other insane cases where accused “criminals” were charged and even imprisoned for lesser events than this, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he was indeed incarcerated. There is a Facebook group launched in support of Roy, and there’s already been a protest, so let’s hope the officers of the law see reason and clear his name.

Seriously, when you just try to return a parking ticket and then get arrested and possibly jailed for terrorism, you know you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(via Blag Hag)
Technorati tags: Purdue University · terrorism · terroristic mischief · police · injustices