By Gretel C. Kovach and Michael E. Young,The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS – When a high school senior delivered marijuana-laced muffins to a group of hungry teachers last month, sending 19 people to the hospital, teenage logic stumbled into the path of a society short on tolerance.

Ian McConnell Walker, the admitted delivery boy from Bishop Lynch High School, and Joseph Robert Tellini of Lake Highlands High, both 18, face five counts each of assault on a public servant.

Since the prank at Lake Highlands High involved marijuana, Dallas County prosecutors plan to ask a grand jury to upgrade the charges from third- to second-degree felonies, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Teenage pranks carry adult-size consequences.

Even as TV shows like “Jackass,” “Punk’d” and “Hi-Jinks” push pranks to outrageous extremes, police, prosecutors, school officials and everyday folks seem less inclined to say “kids will be kids.”

When a student near Canton, Ohio, tried to enlist visitors to an Internet chat room to crash his school’s computer system, he was arrested earlier this year and charged with a felony.

“He said it was a joke,” a prosecutor said. “We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke.”

A student in Michigan faces 20 years in prison for scrawling “Columbine Part Two” on a bathroom wall.

The student body president of a suburban Nashville, Tenn., high school and another student were charged with felony vandalism and burglary last month for “rolling” the school with toilet paper.

The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 contributed to the hard-line legal approach.

“Not only the courts, but the police, jurors – they don’t consider them pranks, and if so, they’re not at all funny,” said Betty Arvin, an assistant prosecutor in the Tarrant County, Texas, district attorney’s office.

“People are just much more aware and much more fearful. They take any type of threat a lot more seriously than they would have prior to all the national and international incidents we’ve had.”

Collin County (Texas) District Attorney John Roach said his office makes no distinction “between a prank and a crime if it’s submitted to us by the police department.”

“We’re going to prosecute it, whatever the motive, whether it was a joke or they actually intended to poison people or burn a house down.”

Even simple pranks that damage or destroy property can escalate into the felony range.

In 1999, some Prosper High seniors climbed the Texas city’s water tower the night before the homecoming football game and spray-painted “Prosper Sr. 2000” on the tower’s battleship-gray sides.

A couple of months later, Billy Peixotto, bound for the Marine Corps, and senior class secretary Jarrod Hennen were called from class, arrested and charged with felony criminal mischief.

Peixotto, then 19, recalled worrying that the charge might keep him from joining the Marines.

“I was supposed to go in in July with a friend of mine on the “buddy program,’ but I had to stay back another month for paperwork and stuff,” said Peixotto, now living in Oklahoma and working at his father’s insurance agency.

He became a tank driver and rolled into Iraq during the initial invasion.

On April 4, 2003, his 2nd Tank Battalion rumbled into At Tuwayhah. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and members of the Islamic Jihad attacked with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, killing three Marines, wounding four others and leaving Lance Cpl. Peixotto’s tank immobile and on fire.

He climbed from the tank, activated the external fire extinguishers, then helped other crew members pull off a leaking fuel bladder. The unit’s commander, Capt. Jeffrey Houston, was shot in the face during the attack.

“I pulled him against the tank, shootin’ and stuff,” Peixotto said a few days later. He applied pressure to Houston’s wound with one hand and used his 9 mm pistol to shoot back.

For his valor, Peixotto was awarded the Bronze Star.

And it proves, said Dr. Tom VanHoose, that “one swallow doesn’t make a summer.”

VanHoose, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, specializes in working with children, adolescents and their families. And he’s learned that all teenagers occasionally fail to exercise good judgment.

“Pranks are pretty normal childhood stuff,” he said, “and kids don’t think of these typically as criminal acts. They’re just thinking about the joke.”

Many never consider the consequences, VanHoose said. Their brains work against them.

“In kids, the last part of the brain to develop is the part that controls forethought. And this is the reason they don’t seem to think through what they do,” he said.

For adults, the frontal lobe of the brain largely controls decision-making. But for many teenagers, the portion of the lower brain that responds to emotional stimuli is used to make decisions.

So in cases like the marijuana muffins, “there is no forethought as to how it could affect people,” VanHoose said.

“You’re talking about a clash between their impulses and their conscience,” he said. “They know something is wrong. But they override that for the amusement factor.

“We keep imposing more and more severe penalties for kids who do stuff like this, yet they keep doing them. We have to realize kids are not going to be fully developed mentally.”

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But their acts can have lasting repercussions.

In one of the most notorious pranks ever in North Texas, 18-year-old Peter Koh, his brother Michael and two others built a mock bomb in a rental truck and parked it outside a Fort Worth school building in 1995. Peter Koh, who was supposed to take a calculus exam there, then called in a bomb threat.

The threat, made barely a month after the Oklahoma City bombing, emptied the building and canceled the test. And Peter Koh, a Paschal High School student and National Merit Scholar semifinalist headed for the University of Texas, went to prison for two years.

He eventually graduated from high school, went to Ohio State University and graduated with honors, then got a job in a bank in South Korea. His brother, a year younger, was arrested in 2001 on an outstanding warrant as he was about to graduate from art school.

Michael Koh struck a plea bargain and was given four years of deferred adjudication.

Neither Peter nor Michael Koh could be reached for comment. Their father, Dr. Sukjung Gerald Koh, did not return calls to his business and home in West Virginia.

A Fort Worth school administrator who knew Peter Koh said he “was a very talented kid.”

“One behavior made him a very tragic situation,” said Dr. Jung Woong Bang.

Peter Koh was able to go to college, though. Others might not be as fortunate.

Texas doesn’t require criminal background disclosures on routine college applications. But applicants to some professional programs, including medicine and teaching, must reveal their pasts.

When Judy Hingle of the National Association for College Admission Counseling heard about the muffin incident in Dallas, she groaned.

“Think, think, think. Think beyond the next five minutes and what’s fun,” she said. “Your actions as you make that transition from high school to college are easily viewed as an indication of how you will perform later in life.”

High school seniors are particularly prone to such lapses, Hingle said.

“The attitude is, “It’s over, I’m out of here,”‘ she said. “That’s why there is the term “senioritis.”‘

An arrest record might not keep a student from his college of choice, but it sure doesn’t help.

“This is an area that is coming into more and more scrutiny,” Hingle said. “It’s not just student pranks. The outlook of the education community is very different these days as they look at liability for things students may or may not get into on their campuses.”

Over the past 10 years, more colleges have started asking applicants whether they’ve committed a felony. An application used by hundreds of colleges asks about an applicant’s disciplinary background.

And North Carolina is considering legislation requiring fingerprinting and criminal background checks before admission to a public university.

That’s just the start of it.

“Once you get into the juvenile justice system, it can be very hard to get out,” said John Roman, a juvenile justice scholar with the Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “And a felony record really means that your life course is totally altered.”

You can’t get federal student loans. It’s harder to find a job. You can’t vote in some states. And you aren’t eligible for public housing benefits.

“Kids commit crimes – it’s part of the maturation process,” Roman said. “They drink. They do silly things like make marijuana brownies for their teachers.”

But a prank gone bad can brand a kid forever, said Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

“Fine them, make them do community service, do something appropriate,” he said. “Don’t give them a felony record.

“It will follow them the rest of their lives.”

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DUMB AND SOMETIMES DEADLY PRANKS

Pranks and stupid stunts that have landed jokesters in trouble:

Earlier this year, a 25-year-old emergency medical technician was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Virginia after he killed a co-worker by playfully zapping her with a defibrillator paddle.

Last month, three Lake Dallas High School seniors were barred from graduation ceremonies because of a food fight.

Also in May, members of the senior class of a Florida Christian school slathered Crisco on door handles, plastic-wrapped toilet seats and replaced their principal’s desk with a preschool-sized one. He canceled graduation ceremonies.

In 2004, two college football players in Michigan detonated homemade bombs outside campus housing as a joke. There were no injuries or damage, but they ended up in jail.

A young man stowed away in a cargo crate on a flight to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in 2003. He was later sentenced to probation and house arrest and fined $1,500.

In 2002, a 17-year-old Midland, Texas, youth nearly burned to death and his buddies were charged with aggravated assault after they tried to duplicate a “human barbecue” stunt from MTV’s “Jackass.”

A California beauty queen gave up her crown in 2001 after she was arrested for writing with chalk on a high school classmate’s car.

An 18-year-old Whataburger cook was arrested in 2001 in The Colony, Texas, after he served a uniformed police officer a taquito with an extra ingredient – marijuana.

In 1999, two Irving, Texas, high school boys were sent to juvenile hall when they laced their teacher’s coffee with what was thought to be LSD.

In 1996, a Louisiana student was shot to death while he and two others tried to steal the letters from a rival fraternity’s house. The shooter said he thought the youths were burglars.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News.

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AP-NY-06-08-06 0611EDT

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