Dumb Even For San Angelo
San Angelo, Texas, is in central west Texas, kinda between Abilene and Del Rio. It’s not the garden spot of Texas so you can kinda understand why your average pipe bomb might provide some entertainment.
Kevin Dykstra, who is 23 years old, was found down at the lake by a 29 year old guy. Early, early Saturday morning, a guy hears his dogs barking and goes to investigate. He comes upon Dykstra laying in the pool of blood with a “crushed 12-ounce Keystone Light can and a machete. An exploded bottle was found in the shop near the pond.”
All this led to this headline in the local newspaper:
So there you have it. Headlines that say to the Rotary Club – scratch this dude off your prospective membership list.
My favorite line? “An update on Dykstra’s status was not provided with the report. There will be no further investigation into the incident.”
No further investigation because drunk and stoopid is what it is.
Thanks to TexasMiataFrank for the heads up.
In a later development, Kevin Dykstra is accepted as an honorary member of the the San Angelo NRA and Tea Party.
1So,what you are saying is pipe bombs are legal in Texas or just so numerous nobody gets excited about them anymore? Not even a ticket for littering?
2Dykstra is San Angelo’s entry in the 2014 Darwin Awards.
3At least he didn’t shoot himself.
4He’s lucky he’s a good ol’ boy, making it OK for him to make his own fireworks (especially when drunk). Imagine if he’d been an anti-fracking activist, or someone helping register voters… he’d never get out of jail.
5Hmmm. Land way out in nowhere, totally pittsville, nothing better to do. Sounds familiar. As far as no further investigation, there had better be. Seems the local constabulary either has no memory of or never ever knew of the way the OK City Bomber ginned himself up by experimenting with different kinds of bombs out in the middle of nowheresville in Michigan. Damn! When are people going to take these “little” incidents seriously!
6If this cheap bar steward hadn’t been drinking such a cheap brand of beer, this never would have happened. right?
7@ Maggie: The difference between “little” incidents and attempted terrorism seems to be whether the authorities agree with the politics of the person committing the acts. Compare and contract the treatment of militia members (perfectly OK to practice squad-level infantry tactics with real rifles) versus Mooslims (10 years in prison for playing paintball in the woods.) Had this guy had a Greenpeace sticker on his car, he’d be under arrest with no bail. With a “Proud NRA Member” sticker, no perceived threat.
8@UmptyDump
9Sadly, no. If his alcohol of choice had been Courvoisier, I think the result would have been the same. The problem is what he thinks not what he drinks. What he thinks leads to building the bomb after the alcohol reduces his inhibition to build the bomb. For sure he is a bomb maker, he may be a true believer as well.
Before y’all get all hot about pipe bomb makers, let me point out that long before all this domestic terrorism stuff got started, boykids in small towns were going out in the boonies and blowing things up with no intent of doing anyone any harm ever. (That’s why they went out in the boonies, ditches, quarries, and other places to do it.) They’d been told it was dangerous, and they wanted to know how dangerous, or they just wanted to hear it go BOOM and see the dirt fly up. When fireworks were available, they used fireworks in ways not intended by the manufacturers…to see what would happen. Or because they’d heard what would happen and had to see for themselves. The craze for making rockets (when I was in high school) came along just in time for some.
I am married to a man who blew things up and once melted a street by accident. Of course, he wasn’t drunk, and except for the street the only damage he did was to the dirt bank of a dry creek. I’m not saying we shouldn’t wonder about a guy making/playing with what sounds more like a bottle grenade than a pipe bomb, whose wound sounds a lot more like a gunshot wound than an explosive wound…and grownups should’ve either joined the bomb squad or given up their interest in making things go BOOM…but the idea that anyone who messes with explosives is bound to become a terrorist is wrong. (Thinking of that black girl in Florida who was arrested and charged with terrorism for a chemistry experiment…and my husband…and me, the person who designed a new rocket fuel for our rocket club that was, indeed, more powerful than what you got in the commercially available rocket “engines” made for kids’ rocket clubs.)
10That’s true, Elizabeth!
11I am reminded of all the times my ex was on call on the 4th of July and all the disfigured young men who had tried stuffing firecrackers into toy cannons or other stupid black powder tricks and ended up with blown off fingers and being one-eyed forever after…adding any kind of drink into the mix and Darwin awards get handed out left and right…sigh.
We are drowning under the weight of the masses of stupid out there…it’s just slow like the pot with the frog in it…so we haven’t noticed it yet…but it’s there.
Ps I always lived in cities, with Universities, so there were lectures and plays and such available–until I went to the middle of nowhere for a cousins wedding, I had not seen such excessive use of drugs and booze–motorcycles full speed down country roads not bothering with stopping or any other social niceties…scared me to death, I was very grateful for my real life in suburbia!
12@Elizabeth
13Made your point. I too must confess some knowledge of ammonium nitrate and dry cell batteries as well as firecrackers under coffee cans and in watermelons and pumpkins. Thanks for helping awaken a long dormant brain cell. Good times! But I do hate being forced to see this knucklehead’s actions in another light. GRR@#$%^&*(!
Yep, it happens in Austin too. Some boys just never grow up. I just hope there are always some vacant lots left for their projects to go BOOM in.
14My husband was assigned to a USAF bomb dump in Vietnam. His did not turn out to be a terrorist, but he is deaf!
15Thing is….. in TEXAS….. there are lots of places to fire guns.
Firing ranges are everywhere.
HOWEVER, not a whole lot of “bomb practicing places”.
You know…. where you can make a bomb, and then test it to see if if works…..
Except for some isolated back yard, and an isolated pond???
And if it doesn’t…. you’re …… well whatever.
Hopefully, Mr. Dykstra will not be able to sire idiots.
16Like I said, I don’t believe, from the description, that Mr. Dykstra was either a high school kid wondering if what he’d read about would work, or in fact “playing with” a pipe bomb that he just happened to find lying around in that “shed.” Broken bottles come from, oh, attempts at homemade bottle rockets or, more commonly, attempts at homemade Molotov cocktails. And a wound that is a small hole on one side and a big bruise on the other sounds a lot more like a small-calibre gunshot wound than a wound from an explosion. (Conferred with retired doc in the house, plus my own background as paramedic: we’ve both seen gunshot wounds and he saw explosion wounds in ‘Nam.)
The failure to investigate further casts doubt on the reliability of the local police force. The guy was on someone else’s property in the middle of the night and injured there in a way that suggests criminal mischief on the part of one or both of those men. Was the homeowner really wakened by barking dogs? Or were the two of them out there with one or both drunk and playing with guns?
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