Subway Jackin – The Weird Part of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.
Did you ever just want to do a joyride? Me and my friend were about fourteen, and we “borrowed” the car of his passed out mother during a sleepover and we hit Latham and Colonie. It’s a wonder we didn’t get caught at 3 in the morning, but the cool thing about being a kid is that unless you really screw up, kill somebody or a substantial B&E, they’ll just get your parents. So we didn’t get caught, and my parents thus unalerted.
Imagine joyriding a subway car in New York? A pair of teenagers, a teenage girl and a teenage boy, hopped an empty subway car at the Briarwood subway station and joyrode it far enough to crash it into a parked train, where they took off.
The 17 year-old girl was found and charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. Can you charge for grand-theft auto on something like this? Guess not.
So my question is; how easy are these cars to start? Are one of those kids’ parents subway engineers? Was it a case of a teen rebelling from the family business? Or did they happen to find a dusty manual in their school library?
And how far did they actually get? Did they say anything like “Vive New York!” when caught? I feel like there is a much bigger story here.
Kids these days, not just happy to tag the subways, now they gotta steal them. Hey, maybe they were bringing it to ta place to get tagged? Or maybe they had already tagged it, and were driving it to get the spray paint to dry quicker?
Yeah, definitely the tip of the iceberg here. I may have to go down to New York to catch an interview or two. Maybe take an Amtrack down there. Tell the conductor I need the full experience. He takes a powder, I take over.