A Tale of Thirteen Year Olds In Loudon County; Road Rage in Frederick

What's with those placid outer suburbs these days?

Loudon Teens

The thirteen-year old set was unusually active Tuesday night in the upscale, suburban Great Falls neighborhood of Loudon County.

Police have arrested two thirteen year old boys and charged them with setting fire to a home, which spread to another, and for burning materials outside yet another home just around the corner.

At the same time, two thirteen year old girls emerged as heroes for alerting the residents inside one of the burning homes about the fire that had been set in their garage.

The Washington Post quoted one of the neighbors thusly: "I thought the whole point of Loudon County was it was safe and this kind of thing doesn't happen here." Hey, no place is completely safe. But that kind of thing doesn't happen in our neighborhood in Arlington. (Not yet, at least.)

Frederick Rage

Yesterday, a young couple from Pennsylvania died in an apparent road rage incident along I-270 in Frederick County when a man in a pick-up truck cut them off, causing their car to careen off the highway and flip several times. The Pennsylvania male had evidently been exchanging obscene gestures with the pick-up male and was trailing perilously close behind at high speed, all during heavy rush hour traffic at around 8:00 a.m.

Police are looking for the driver of the pick-up (Mrs. Curmudgeon said she heard on the radio that someone had been arrested, but we can't find any confirmation to that effect on the internet).

It's truly alarming when you go out driving just about anywhere, at how many just awful, rude, aggressive drivers there are (and not always men, but certainly disproportionately so). Frankly, if living in the outer suburbs, we'd be much more concerned about the menace from these road jerks--given all the extra driving required in suburban living--than from the occasional miscreant teen.

We hope the police find the pick-up driver and take him off the streets. These people are as a big a threat to society as random killers.

[The Curmudgeon had an interesting run-in with road rage a decade or so ago, on I-95 south, near Ikea, while stuck in slow-moving Christmas holiday exodus traffic. Deciding it made sense to grab a burger while traffic was stalled, we moved into the exit lane, which put us in front of a grizzly fellow illegally barreling down the shoulder. He honked, flipped us the finger and jerked his car around us before we both got stuck in the traffic on the exit ramp. When we honked back at him, he flashed a pistol out the window. It's times like that when you ask "where's a cop when you need 'em?" But this time, the cop was there, right behind us! An off-duty D.C. police officer, sitting in his civilian car, saw the gun. Without hesitation, he jumped out of his car and sprinted up to old grizzly guy, and that was that. We would've liked to stick around and see more, and wish we knew whether the guy ever did jail time (probably not), but we had many miles to go, and were waved around so as not to further tie up traffic while local police were summoned. We sure were glad to see this jerk get his come-uppance.]