Teenagers are known for playing pranks on innocent victims. However, a fifteen-year-old boy was shot after he ran up to a home in Long Island, rang the doorbell, and was mowed down by the sixty-four-year-old homeowner with a shotgun blast. The teen simply chose the wrong house when he went to James Moshier’s home for a game of “ding dong ditch,” which was played during a sleepover with friends on Long Island.
Although authorities have not identified the victim by name, they did confirm that they airlifted him to a nearby hospital after the shooting. Thankfully, the boy did not die as a result of Moshier’s shotgun blast. He is expected to make a full recovery after he was shot by a hunting gun during a prank gone wrong.
The incident occurred on Thursday night. A group of seven teenagers, including the boy who was shot by the Long Island homeowner, left the home where they were staying and started to wander around the neighborhood. Since they got bored, they decided that they would enjoy a round of pranks to lighten the mood. The group of youngsters settled on a game of “ding dong ditch,” a prank in which children ring a homeowner’s doorbell and try to flee the scene before the person opens the door.
A woman inside the Long Island home mistakenly feared that they were being burglarized. She flew into a terror and told Moshier that he had better deal with the situation before they got robbed or worse.
“We had several kids that were running around the neighborhood knocking on doors and running away, and one of the residents felt that somebody was trying to get into the house, felt threatened, felt frightened, and woke up the male occupant of the house, who went to the back door and discharged a shotgun,” Southold Town Police Captain James Ginas told CBS News.
The teen knocked on Moshier’s door three times. Before he was able to flee as per the prank, the homeowner blasted the teen through the glass door, striking the boy with a blast of shotgun pellets in his upper right arm.
After the attack, the teen ran back to his friends and told them that he had been hit by a grenade blast. Thankfully, he was not fatally injured and only needed to get some help at an area hospital before he was listed in stable condition.
Eventually, authorities airlifted the boy to the hospital, where he was expected to make a full recovery from Moshier’s unwarranted attack.
Now, Long Island authorities are charging Moshier with assault and recklessly injuring a child with a deadly weapon. The offender managed to post $20,000 as bail and was released from custody. However, he is expected to make a return to the Long Island courtroom in the next few weeks.
Although this teen managed to survive the shotgun blast, area police are telling children to “be smart” when it comes to pranking random people.
“Sometimes what we think are harmless pranks turn into major incidents,” Southold Police Capt. James Ginas said.