“We assumed he was at a friend’s house. We had no idea where he was”. Says the father of a nine-year-old boy who wasn’t at a friend’s house. By the time his parents figured out he was missing, the boy had somehow snuck onboard an aircraft and travelled halfway across the US as a stowaway.
Without a ticket. And without clearing security.
Flying from Minneapolis to Las Vegas, once found the boy — who has “behavioural issues” — told police he thought he was playing Grand Theft Auto. You know. The mission where you sneak onboard a plane and just sit there quietly.
9-year-old stowaway thought he was playing video game [MSN — thanks R R!]
Comments
54 responses to “Kid Sneaks Past Security, Hides In Plane, Blames… Grand Theft Auto”
Media blaming games in 3… 2… 1… Ignoring the question of why a 9 year old is playing GTA in the first place, naturally…
Or how a child can so easily get on a plane. What if he had been al qaeda osama commie kim jon un hitler french sleeper cell bomb person.
wait, why is a 9 year old playing a video game a question?
Because it’s GTA?
GTA V is rated Restricted 18+ in Australia and Mature 17+ in the United States.
9 year old. Parents. Letting him play GTA. Something rather.
Just walking on the tarmac earns you 3 wanted stars. If anything GTA V teaches you not to walk around the airport.
Letting a 9 year old with a record of behavioural issues play GTA. That’s some award winning parenting right there. I can’t say I’m surprised he made it halfway across the country without them noticing.
Without anyone noticing. Not even airport security. How the hell would he get past check-in? Let alone actually showing his ticket to get on the plane? Insane.
His wanted level should have risen to at least 3 stars!
He probably bought the hangar and just walked in past the lazy baggage handlers onto the planes cargo bay 😛
Kids nowadays! With their smart phones and millions of dollars of expandable cash…
I blame GTA V & Breaking Bad!`
Well, what else am I gonna blame when the cops do a raid on my meth lab.
The newspaper for telling your neighbours how to spot a meth lab?
That book your assistant cook gave you for your brother-in-law to find?
They may not have wanted to know where he was.
Don’t you know “behavioral issues” means “we don’t punish our kid, we blame his bad traits on outside influences and assume we’re good parents”?
actually theres alot more to this story. The kid did blame it on GTA but the father also insited that they dont have GTA in the house. This Kid also stole a truck, took out a tree and then rammed into the back of cop car 3 weeks before he did this. Child services have even been to the house 3 to 4 times and are not blaming the parents, they solely foot the blame on the kid.
So you know something is up went child services are blaming the kid and not the parents
Not gonna lie, that is actually impressive.
Had the advantage of being low profile, children can also be seen as less suspicious than adults.
must’ve gotten an early beta of the DLC where you try and scam an airline out of as much free stuff as possible
If I ever do something wrong I am totally blaming video games. Such an easy scape goat.
Spilled some milk this morning.
I blame Grand Theft Auto.
Also……..
“We assumed he was at a friend’s house. We had no idea where he was”.
PARENTS OF THE YEAR.
Won’t somebody think of the parents that don’t give a toss what games their underage kids are playing!
But baby sitters are so expensive!
Next week it’ll be, “Man tries to jump over wall and falls hurting his head, blames Grand Theft Auto”
Or lets just be really boring and pull a heist then blame GTA.
Unless in the process you murder twenty thousand police officers, in which case you’ll need to blame Payday 2.
Or (possible spoiler)
“Man fucks teddy bear in the eye, blames Grand Theft Auto”Poor Mr. Raspberry Jam!Errr, yes. GTA made me do it.
“Man goes in for haircut, comes out with enormous beard, blames Grand Theft Auto”
Man gets caught with hooker, blames GTA.
He can’t blame GTA unless he shoots her after to get his money back.
Man goes to the cinema then takes a walk down the beach to watch the sunset by the Ferris wheel and blames GTA.
Hahaha, that’s gold!
Man plays darts, arm wrestles, plays pool, goes for a swim in the ocean… Blames GTA
Or
Man kills cousin over bowling invite… Blames GTA; but judge, jury and media finds man not guilty.
“Cousin! Do you want to go bo-” GLACK GLACK GLACK.
How did he even get to the airport in the first place? Learnt from GTA how to steal a car and drive?
Man.. these stories lol
This kid has been in the news before. He stole a truck and crashed it, blaming GTA
The family doesn’t own any GTA games. The child is just a little shit, people.
Girl removes underpants on live “Australias got talent”. Blames GTA
Your fukn kidding me. Blame the incompetent parents for letting their 9 year old kid with behavioural issues and god knows what else play a R18+ mature video game.Don’t even fuckn dare blame the game industry or developers for this bullshit.
I blame that rock and roll music, it’s wicked stuff, all that wicked hip swivelling is turning our youth into servants of the devil.
The metric system is the tool of the devil. My car gets forty rods to the hogs head and that’s the way I likes it.
So yeah, this one turned into a bit of a rant, there was a bit about this story in particular that really annoyed me. I don’t know why this particular story bugs me more than the others of it’s caliber. Not enough healthy discussion of milk, I think.
Okay, the first problem I have with this is much the same as everyone else: the age of the kid.
What the hell is a nine year old doing playing Grand Theft Auto? Now, I suppose you could argue that I was also playing GTA when I was nine. But that was sixteen years ago and things have very much changed. A child has no business playing GTA in this day and age.
Secondly, the kid’s reaction to it (I’m literal, unless the author has paraphrased): “he thought he was playing Grand Theft Auto.”
At nine years old, I damn well knew the difference between actually doing and sitting down with a control pad and acting. My imagination ran with the best of them, I spent a lot of time fighting imaginary ninjas and monsters Ninja Turtle style (I could be good at fire twirling now because of it, at least), but I could still tell the difference between watching and doing. Unless this kid has some serious mental issues no one has mentioned (runs deeper than ‘behavioral issues’), he shouldn’t be playing Video games at all, let alone something like GTA. He now strikes me as the kind of person that, in roughly eight years, we’ll be reading about for shooting up a school/university (provided he could still easily get access to a firearm).
That, or he’s smart enough to think blaming a video game will take the media heat off him and put it on said video game.
Thirdly, how he managed to get on the aircraft in the first place.
Kudos for the effort nonetheless, but a child managing to get on a plane completely unnoticed is rather unnerving. I always considered airports to be rather safe. I was tested for explosives residue simply because I looked around for my mate who had wandered off and caught eyes with the guy. He was polite about it and explained everything nicely and all that, so it was cool. Anyway, at nine years old you’re two things: Old enough to know right from wrong and stupid enough to believe anything. If a mindless kid can do it…
And finally, the parents initially not knowing the location of their nine year old.
I suppose we are dealing with a generation of parents who think a two year old is capable of carrying on a conversation on a semi adult level. Let alone understanding why they can’t take the things off the shelf and throw it in the trolly at their leisure (yes, keep saying “no you can’t do that”, it’s obviously working). I suppose it’s good to give your nine year old independence and freedom so you’re not influencing them too much. I wonder if they texted his smartphone.
Yes, fine, I’m being cranky and unfair here. I am naturally assuming he has a phone (a smartphone at that), but in my defence, we are dealing with the parents of the year here. We can probably rest assured he had it taken off him when he was grounded for going to Vegas without their permission/knowledge.
Witness the onset of grumpy old person syndrome.
Video games can be very helpful for children especially those with behavioral issues. They can be a kind of digital punching bag through which a child can work out their frustrations and vent their anger, making them less likely to get violent in real life. There is an entire market of games for autistic, down syndrome and similar conditions that help the kids develop themselves mentally. Video games can certainly put the wrong ideas in kid’s heads, but they’re just as capable of positive benefits as well. As long as they have parents that are aware and in control of what their kid plays and has access to.
Hahaha, I kinda hope that’s true.
I used to travel for my previous career and I’ve taken hundreds of flights. And I get ‘randomly’ selected for the explosive test about 19 times out of 20 while the people I traveled with got tested probably 1 in every 20 times, one of my colleagues who was a blonde guy of German heritage, never once got tested. People are selected for fitting a very specific profile. I eventually began walking straight over to the explosive testing staff to save them the hassle of approaching me. I have a friend that gets selected 95% of the time as well.
Why would a 9 year old have a phone? I have two kids, 6 and 8 years old and they are nowhere near needing a phone. I let them visit their friend’s house after school and they can be gone for around 2 to 3 hours but they tell me which house they are visiting and I have their phone numbers. But I wouldn’t give my oldest boy a phone till he’s in high school at the earliest.
I work in retail and witness a lot of children carrying phones separate from what their parents are carrying. I’ve seen more eight year olds with phones better than mine than any oher scary thing in the world.
I disassociate “video games” from the aids to the disabled you mentioned as well. They’re strategically designed to serve a purpose other than entertainment. I consider them educational tools. Games they may be, I don’t really refer to them as such. Sorry for the confusion there.
As for the airport security. I’m a six ft tall, reasonably well presented Australian white guy. Whatever criteria I checked off as, the majority of the people around me did to.
There’s also a difference between “grumpy old man syndrome” and a nine year old playing a game built for a demographic twice his age. It is rated R, and rightly so. What if the kid decides to strap his friend to a chair near a wrench?
To clarify, there’s no way I’d let my kids play GTA. I don’t let them watch me either. I was just talking about you’re grumpy old person language, don’t worry, I catch myself saying all that kinda stuff myself.
I’m white too, but I think it’s the dark black hair and styled facial hair that gets me checked by the explosive guys every time. When a guy joined our staff who looked a lot like me (people would even ask if we were brothers) he got check every single time as well.
And I’m not just talking about educational tools, I’m talking about stuff like Trials Evolution, Street Fighter and Minecraft. Stuff that lets you hit, break, chop and destroy can be really cathartic for kids. My youngest son has autism and he loves breaking down sandcastles (literally and figuratively) and some games give him a similar feeling. Sometimes he loves playing open world games like Hulk or Spider-man and he’ll spend hours on end throwing cars into building and throwing cars into other cars or people. He just gets a kick out of that kind of activity and being able to do it digitally is sometimes a really big release for him. He can come home from school as an unmanageable ball of physical fury and after an hour of building and smashing Lego or repeatedly throwing the rider from Trials down a mountain, he can emerge as a completely calm and well mannered child.
And that’s crazy about kids with phones, that blows my mind. My kids can wait, my friends and I all lasted the entirety of school without owning a mobile. See, there’s my grumpy old man coming out.
I did overlook the wonderful simplicity of games like Minecraft. There’s been quite a few “aww” stories involving kids and that one. I should clarify video games as “mature video games”, but I think you get me at this stage.
I was in year 11 when I got my prepaid Nokia brick. There’s a massive amount of difference between what my teenager phone could do and what my adult phone can do.
I think there’s companies that do phones for kids. Limited call numbers, automated shutoffs and data capping kind of stuff. But it’s still pretty niche I think.
As for children and violent media, I think it ultimately comes down to the individual. If your child is capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality and has a firm grasp on right and wrong, it shouldn’t matter how violent the media. Though it’s best not to rob them of all the fun early I suppose. Then again, all I have to base this theory off is my own upbringing, those of my friends and the fact our “violent media” was far more distinguishable from reality. Movies weren’t as clear on CRT + VHS and games weren’t striving for realism they’re capable of today. Maybe these days it can matter.
I think all but a small percentage of kids know reality from fantasy, I think the bigger problem is kids acting out what they see in media. When I was at school, every kid at school knew Ninja Turtles wasn’t real but it didn’t stop kids whacking each other with sticks, one kid in my neighborhood earned our town some time on the national news when he threw an empty bottle into the air and hit it with a makeshift staff and the shattering glass blinded him in one eye. I can also remember plenty of kids falling from high places wearing Superman capes when I was a kid. I think kids are more likely to imitate negative things in media because it’s glamorized and made cool. So, for me personally it’s more about monkey see monkey do as opposed to monkey can’t distinguish reality. I have to be careful my son doesn’t have a media diet that has too much violence, despite the fact that I relegate him to games and movies that have very abstract violence (like Minecraft). We try to switch it up with the things he is exposed to.
I’m fortunate though, my autistic son has a really developed vocabulary along with an extremely advanced perception (often with autism kids lack in some areas but are extremely advanced in others) and as a result he takes everything extremely literally. If I say something like ‘last one in is a rotten egg’ he can break down because he doesn’t understand it’s a joke, he really thinks I’m telling him he’s literally a rotten egg and he’ll yell at me “I’m not an egg I’m a human being”. So, as you might imagine he’s almost over-aware of fiction being fictional. If I said something like “wow, that creeper doesn’t like you” he’s probably explain to me that it’s programmed to do that.
Yeah, I understand what you meant now. And I totally agree, there’s no reason a young child should be playing games like GTA, not when there’s so many incredible games for kids to enjoy. Some of the games my kids play are so incredible, better than what we had when I was young.
Yeah, this story just makes me angry and uncomfortable on so many different levels. I’m usually pretty laid back, but there are a few things that really, really annoy me. After working many years for a large cinema chain, horrible parents are at the top of my list. Horrible drivers are a close second.
It’s like you’ve taken the words right out of my brain sir.
How the hell does a 9 year old kid get from ‘friend’s house’ to the frakin’ airport anyway?