This is why we teach you not to play with matches, kids.

Story here

Quote :

Two boys have confessed to setting a six-alarm condo fire that caused more than $2 million in damage, Dallas Fire-Rescue said this morning.

Six alarms. That's a lot of fire, everyone.

Quote :

Fire offficials said the two boys, younger than the age of 8, have confessed that they threw matches down a trash chute in a hallway. The boys have been released to the custody of their parents.

Here's the fun part: state law prohibits prosecution of children under the age of 10. It will be up to the parents only to discipline them.

Quote :

The Saturday fire at the Hearthwood Condos in the 12300 block of Abrams Road completely destroyed one building and impacted an additional 48 units, Dallas Fire-Rescue said.

What I'd like to know is where were their parents when this happened.

See now, I'm normally against using violence to punish children, but in this case, the parents need to beat the shit out of these kids. Following that, somebody needs to beat the shit out of the parents for utterly failing at parenthood and, indeed, life itself.

make them pay back the losses over their adult lives.

This sounds like just the sort of dumb thing unsupervised kids would do. Where the hell were the adults when this was happening?

You can't watch your children every second of every day for every moment of their lives, even when you are a good parent. The article doesn't really give any indication one way or the other. It's possible these parents are just normal people who let their kids play around the apartment complex and the children decided not to listen to warnings they were given about the dangers of fire. It's equally possible the parents are neglectful, ignorant fools who don't deserve to have responsibility for any other human being.

Now, let me see, as an appropriate expression of my outrage... There are 48 impacted units, aside from the one the fire destroyed. The kids in question should be made to do janitorial work for each and every one of those buildings for at least the next five years. You make a mess this big, you get to clean it up for a long, long time.

KelinciHutan wrote:

It's possible these parents are just normal people who let their kids play around the apartment complex

Hmm. Maybe my mom was just overprotective, but I basically wasn't allowed out of her sight until I was like 14, much less do anything like 'play around the apartment complex', and I wasn't even a troublemaker or anything - I was the very model of a 'good child'. Actually... fuck maybe. I know she was overprotective. Still, though, the idea of two kids less than eight years old being allowed to run around an apartment complex unsupervised makes me cock my head a little, to say the least.

Quote :

Now, let me see, as an appropriate expression of my outrage... There are 48 impacted units, aside from the one the fire destroyed. The kids in question should be made to do janitorial work for each and every one of those buildings for at least the next five years. You make a mess this big, you get to clean it up for a long, long time.

That's actually a good idea. Much better than mine.

I'd still like to see someone thrashed within an inch of their lives though. Can't let these thrashin' paddles go to waste.

quamp wrote:

Here's the fun part: state law prohibits prosecution of children under the age of 10.

And what, you disagree with that?


These kids need to be punished in an age-appropriate fashion. Neither beating them to within an inch of their lives nor sentencing elementary schoolers to a life time of crippling debt is age-appropriate.

DarthDarthington wrote:

Much better than mine.

Put politely: I agree.

Trouble is, there ain't a goddamn thing that the law can do. An adult would go to prison for about five years, minimum, for arson. These kids will probably get a slap on the wrist from mommy and daddy.

And somebody could have been KILLED in that fire. People lost everything.

DarthDarthington wrote:

Hmm. Maybe my mom was just overprotective, but I basically wasn't allowed out of her sight until I was like 14, much less do anything like 'play around the apartment complex', and I wasn't even a troublemaker or anything - I was the very model of a 'good child'.

Me too actually but as far as I could tell, nearly all the other kids in my class at school were running around the streets unsupervised from the age of at least seven. So I can't see that allowing your children to run around the hallways of your own building is all that neglectful, far less so than allowing them outside where there's traffic. The only problem is that in this case, the children in question took the opportunity to do dangerous experiments and ended up causing a lot of damage. These parents may be terribly neglectful or they may not be.

grmblfjx wrote:

These kids need to be punished in an age-appropriate fashion. Neither beating them to within an inch of their lives nor sentencing elementary schoolers to a life time of crippling debt is age-appropriate.

Word. These kids were eight - I doubt that they have the capacity to understand the risk they were running by playing with matches.

Quote :

Trouble is, there ain't a goddamn thing that the
law can do. An adult would go to prison for about five years, minimum,
for arson. These kids will probably get a slap on the wrist from mommy
and daddy.

Incorrect. You sue the parents. It works like that on my jurisdiction. I remember reading one case where a girl riding a Sea-doo crashes into a hapless adult surfer; mom and dad ended up paying in a civil suit for the surfer's missing teeth.

So the solution is not sentencing 8-year-olds for hard labor; it's suing the parents for everything they have in a civil suit.

Well at least the tax payer ain't footing out the bill.

And hey, if parents are getting sued because of their kids, maybe those kids will get the whipping they so richly deserve.

quamp wrote:

Six alarms. That's a lot of fire, everyone.

That is more than the average amount of fire.

How could they DO this? Fire is supposed to SOLVE problems, not CAUSE them!

Harley Quinn hyenaholic wrote:

How could they DO this? Fire is supposed to SOLVE problems, not CAUSE them!

Is there any universe currently in existence wherein what you just said makes any sense at all? Because it kind of looks like you're just spouting nonsense, now.

IIRC "alarm" refers to the number of floors on fire. Skyscrapers have had 12+ alarm fires.

Penguin wrote:

IIRC "alarm" refers to the number of floors on fire. Skyscrapers have had 12+ alarm fires.

I thought it was the number of crews called to the fire.

So if station 10 could handle it themselves, it's a 1 alarm fire. If you need stations 10 through 17, it's a 7 alarm fire. Or something like that.

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

Penguin wrote:

IIRC "alarm" refers to the number of floors on fire. Skyscrapers have had 12+ alarm fires.

I thought it was the number of crews called to the fire.

So if station 10 could handle it themselves, it's a 1 alarm fire. If you need stations 10 through 17, it's a 7 alarm fire. Or something like that.

Wikipedia says this on the subject. Which means that a six-alarm fire may, in fact, not be "more than the average amount of fire" so much as it required more than the average amount of effort from the firefighters to put it out.

I fail to see how beating anyone is a good response to this. Nor do I see what would be accomplished by sending these kids to prison, or penalizing them for the rest of their lives. Maybe there's a good reason why kids under eight can't be prosecuted.

These kids are younger than eight. It doesn't sound like they set the building on fire intentionally, and kids that young have trouble with risk-assessment and understanding potential consequences, sometimes.

A lot of kids do things that could potentially have bad outcomes. It's just that, a lot of times, they get lucky and nothing horrible happens. I don't know that I can call it irresponsibility on the child's part if they're too young to understand that what they're doing is dangerous or irresponsible. That's why, until the kid is a certain age, it's the parents that have a lot of culpability.

And it's the parents who are culpable, here. Maybe they didn't do anything wrong, maybe they did. But they're responsible for what they kids do.

Personally, I'm just glad no one died. Perhaps this incident will have taught them a valuable lesson about not playing with fire.

DeeDee wrote:

These kids are younger than eight. It doesn't sound like they set the building on fire intentionally, and kids that young have trouble with risk-assessment and understanding potential consequences, sometimes.

A lot of kids do things that could potentially have bad outcomes. It's just that, a lot of times, they get lucky and nothing horrible happens. I don't know that I can call it irresponsibility on the child's part if they're too young to understand that what they're doing is dangerous or irresponsible. That's why, until the kid is a certain age, it's the parents that have a lot of culpability.

And it's the parents who are culpable, here. Maybe they didn't do anything wrong, maybe they did. But they're responsible for what they kids do.

This. Most kids under the age of ten, unless they're either very intelligent or their parents have spent their whole lives pounding them over the head with it, don't have a clear understanding of cause and effect. They're certainly old enough to know that matches are dangerous, and have probably been warned not to play with them, but they don't necessarily make the connection between throwing lighted matches down a garbage chute and setting a building on fire the way an older kid or an adult would.

As DeeDee said, the blame here lies on the parents, who should've kept a better eye on their kids. Unfortunately (and it happens all the time in the neighborhood where I live), there are a fair amount of parents who just let their kids wander the streets and assume someone else is going to keep an eye on them.

Rabid Badger wrote:

DeeDee wrote:

These kids are younger than eight. It doesn't sound like they set the building on fire intentionally, and kids that young have trouble with risk-assessment and understanding potential consequences, sometimes.

This.

Thanks, guys. I find it unbelievable that people need to have this pointed out to them, but there you go.

Aggie wrote:

Personally, I'm just glad no one died. Perhaps this incident will have taught them a valuable lesson about not playing with fire.

I hope so.

Rabid Badger wrote:

This. Most kids under the age of ten, unless they're either very intelligent or their parents have spent their whole lives pounding them over the head with it, don't have a clear understanding of cause and effect. They're certainly old enough to know that matches are dangerous, and have probably been warned not to play with them, but they don't necessarily make the connection between throwing lighted matches down a garbage chute and setting a building on fire the way an older kid or an adult would.

I remember years ago, I saw some experiment on Dateline or one of those shows where kids who had been warned by their parents not to go with strangers were secretly watched while an actor approached them with a "want to help me find my puppy?" story. A lot of the kids were willing to go off with the person without much hesitation, even after being warned by their parents.

When I was young, I was easily scared into obedience if I was told that something was dangerous, would make me sick, etc. I never really questioned my parents. I was also a bit paranoid, period. But still, I didn't really have a complex understanding of actual risks and consequences. If anything, I erred on overly-cautious (I remember I had this roller skating Barbie with skates that would shoot little sparks if you rolled them on a hard surface. I wouldn't play with the skates because I thought they'd start a fire. Once I was a little older, I was able to figure out that the skates probably weren't a huge danger).

They threw lit matches down a garbage chute, for crying out loud. They were obviously TRYING to start a fire.

I just expect they didn't expect it to set the whole building alight.