Senior Prank Gets Four Ohio Teens Felony Charges

The Senior Prank is a time-honored tradition among graduating high school students, but for four Ohio teens, it’s probably something they would rather forget.

According to MyFoxDetroit, Taylor Monroe, 18, Stewart Parrott, 18, Anthony Esposito, 19, and Justin Weekly were each charged with felony vandalism and disrupting public service after removing the valve stems from 24 school buses in the Northwestern Local School District.

The news site reports that the 2,000-student district was forced to miss school and that it sustained thousands of dollars in damages as a result.

Authorities knew that it was a senior prank because the quartet left little room for doubt. They left behind a chalk-written message that read as follows.

“You have been pranked by seniors 2015… To have school or to not have school?”

From there, Monroe and her three male accomplices quickly found out that leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for investigators to find someone willing to rat them out wasn’t the best of ideas.

“I’m disappointed in the students,” District Superintendent Tony Orr said in comments to WHIO. “We expect our students to use better judgment. But in this case, they did not. They’re going to have to pay for it.”

Orr said that the day of missed school would probably have to be made up, but it would not affect the graduation schedule.

Among the repercussions that many innocent people were feeling as a result of the senior prank were a missed field trip, parents having to pay for childcare, or having to take off from work.

This isn’t the first time the Inquisitr has reported on pranks that quickly get out of hand. Take this story about a senior prank gone horribly wrong that resulted in 100 students being banned from graduation ceremonies, a principal suspended without pay, a sheriff’s deputy without a job, and three teachers filing worker’s compensation claims against the school.

The prank happened at the Sequoyah High School in Madisonville, Tennessee, and ended with the school’s halls being filled with hay, trash, urine, and even dead animals.

What do you think about cases like this and that of the Ohio bus prank? Should students face felony charges for this sort of thing, or are Clark County officials going too far in their punishment of the teens? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Image via Shutterstock]