A lot of my friends in middle school were skaters. I couldn’t skate, but I was good with a camera, so I filmed them for skating videos. We all lived in an up-and-coming area at the time, so there were a lot of houses that were being built. My friends wanted to try skating on the concrete foundation of a half built home.

It turns out that there were vandals breaking windows of some of these houses that were under construction in the same area. Someone who saw us thought we were the vandals and they call the cops.

I spotted a police car pulling up and we all booked it through the woods (even though we weren’t the vandals). They eventually caught up to us. One of my friends immediately started crying. The cop immediately assumed we were the vandals, but I showed him the skating footage and we all told him what really happened.

The cop basically scared us straight because trespassing is still a crime, but we didn’t get in any sort of serious trouble. He was overall a pretty understanding guy because all of us were no older than 14. He told us to call 911 if we saw anybody vandalizing the houses, but he wanted all of our parents to call the police station.

My mom basically grounded me for the rest of the semester.