“Truck meet” youths under increased scrutiny following incidents

ANTIGO — Two minors have been referred to juvenile court for fleeing Antigo Police officers in the past two weeks.

Per department policy, the police terminated both pursuits on the outskirts of the city, before later identifying and charging the vehicle drivers.

The second pursuit, which occurred just before 5 a.m. April 9, began after the suspect was seen driving 52 mph in a 25 mph zone near Langlade Road and Elmo Street.

The first began in the Dunham’s parking lot after Officer Timothy Fitzpatrick arrived there around 10:30 p.m. April 5 in response to a complaint from one boy that several others were threatening to beat him up.

Approximately 10 vehicles were parked in the lot when Fitzpatrick arrived, at which time one boy jumped in his Dodge pickup truck and sped off. He ran a stop sign as he fled across Neva Road, and cut through the Arby’s parking lot and Progress Boulevard before heading west on Highway 64 and — for that night at least — escaping.

Calls to the Dunham’s parking lot, where local high school-aged youths often drive at night to hang out, have increased in recent months as store employees and others in the area have grown tired of their sometimes-unruly behavior.

“It’s driving recklessly and being loud and kind of harassing other people, and when you get a collection of kids together, there’s problems between them,” Antigo Police Chief Dan Duley said. “On top of that, they’re constantly leaving a mess in the parking lot. So it just comes with a bunch of different issues and it’s unfortunate that they’re ruining that.”

Nearly all employees of the stores have seen the teenagers and their trucks in the parking lot. A few, like Dunham’s employee Linda Pisczor, characterized them as relatively normal, rambunctious kids.

“They usually just line up out there and sit and talk,” Pisczor said. “There’s been a few times when they’ll tear around and drive in circles real fast. There was once or twice when they were shooting off fireworks, but that doesn’t happen hardly at all — it was back in December I think.”

Assistant Manager of Shoe Sensation Natasha Lundgren called the gatherings “truck meets,” and said she has told customers who visit the store later at night to watch out for speeding vehicles in the parking lot. She explained that the behavior of the kids varies because the kids are not part of one group.

“We used to have a group of trucks that would harass people a lot. I don’t know which group was which, because we’ve had so many, and they switch constantly. One day, it was all white trucks, then the other day, it’s beat-up trucks. But we’ve always had people in our parking lot constantly. Some of them stick to themselves and they’re fine. Others cause havoc and they’ll spin in circles in our parking lot and those are the ones that I don’t like because it’s like, ‘OK, you’re a nuisance, and there’s still people around.’”

One night after work about six months ago, Lundgren said she was attempting to turn out of the parking lot left onto Superior St. when several trucks drove up alongside her to block her progress.

“There is a flat median, and they pulled up on top of that median right next to me,” she said. “I couldn’t see at all and they kept cutting me off, and then another one would come, and they just kept coming. They kept laughing and kept cutting me off. So they were screwing with me. I didn’t find it funny though. I was trying to get home. I turned right instead and turned around and went back to the light to go through.”

Heather Palazzo, an assistant manager at TJ Maxx, said around New Year’s, one of the boys rear-ended her vehicle while it was parked. Though the damage does not look catastrophic in pictures, it was declared totaled.

“One of my associates was outside having a cigarette and she witnessed everything and she was the one that told me about it,” Palazzo said. “I was actually very thankful that she was out there because she said it almost seemed like they were going to take off if she didn’t start walking towards them. But she just said he was backing out of the spot and just didn’t see it apparently and just smashed right into it. It literally was parked straight in the parking lot, and when I came out there, it was diagonal outside of the lines — that’s how hard he hit it.”

An incident one night not long after this seemed to cause Palazzo and her coworkers more concern than the accident itself.

“We were walking out to our vehicles and all of a sudden right past me, some kid comes and jumps both medians with his truck, and it was really close to me and my rental vehicle,” Palazzo said. “Somebody absolutely could have been hurt. My boss, the store manager, after that especially, she called the cops and kind of told them the situation and they said that they would start sort of monitoring at our closing time.”

Some of the “truck meet” kids now seem to prefer the Goodwill parking lot according to Lundgren, a change she guessed was due to the cops being called on them so many times in front of Dunham’s.

One Goodwill employee named Ryan Jackson said his own daughter and her boyfriend are among those who often meet in the parking lots.

“She’s a typical 19-year-old kid — parents will tell her to stop doing things and they say, ‘I’ll just move out.’ That kind of thing. Sometimes you can just chalk it up to being teenagers, but I told them, I said, ‘One of these times you’re going to do it in the wrong place and you’re going to get in real trouble,’” Jackson said. “There’s been a couple times where her little car has almost been clipped, and his truck. A couple jeeps have been clipped — nothing major, just some scrapes and maybe a small dent here and there.”

Though Jackson admitted to engaging in similar activity as a teenager and, in turn, to having slightly more tolerance for his daughter’s participation, he said he knows what they have been doing “borders [going] over the line.”

“I’ve seen kids get bumped when I’ve had to come pick up my daughter. I’ve seen one kid got smacked and kind of knocked to the ground when somebody was doing donuts. Some of them, they’ll line up their trucks and sometimes they’ll drag race them, sometimes whatever,” he said. “I know kids will be kids, but it has gotten to the point of knocks in the head and somebody could have a concussion and go home and not think about it, and then the next thing you know, their parents are putting them in the ground because nobody recognized they had a concussion.”

Duley said patrols have ramped up in the area because of the reports, and a number of loitering citations have been issued. He indicated that the department takes the matter extremely seriously, but also emphasized that similar issues have existed in the city since he joined the department over 20 years ago, and that only certain of the teenagers actually have been causing disturbances in the parking lots.

“We’ve dealt with these types of issues for many years in different parking lots throughout the city. The kids of certain ages are looking for places to go and hang out with their friends to do something,” Duley said. “If it was just that they gathered and didn’t cause any problems with driving recklessly or squealing their tires and not leaving so much garbage around, if they just went there and sat and talked, this probably wouldn’t be a problem.

“But they just can’t keep their behaviors in line. And then we get the harassment issue and the little fights that break out between them. If the kids would just go there and talk, then we probably wouldn’t have any issues. But every place they go, it gets ruined for themselves because they can’t drive decently and pick up their garbage and get along. But it can’t continue and we will do everything in our power and means and ability to curb those actions.”