Thinking about posting all of the details regarding your upcoming birthday party to various social media outlets? Unless you’re prepared for a huge turnout and a fair amount of property damage, you may want to rethink this decision.
Bradley McAnulty was only expecting around 30 attendees at his 16th birthday party in the quaint suburb of Poole, Dorset. However, as word about the shindig spread throughout the community courtesy of Facebook and text messaging, more and more unruly teenagers started showing up to the party. The total number of uninvited revelers was estimated at around 400, which grossly exceeded how many McAnulty and his father had originally anticipated.
‘I got a call from one of the neighbours and they said there are about 100 kids on the street, and I just went mad. As far as I was aware Bradley was having a good time with a few friends,” Bradley’s father told The Daily Mail. “I told Bradley not to put it on Facebook and to tell his friends not to, so it wasn’t him.”
Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for the situation to get totally out-of-hand. As the number of partiers quickly increased, so did the amount of trouble. Intoxicated kids pulled doors off hinges, destroyed objects in and around the McAnulty’s yard, and tossed empty beer containers into the street. Two young girls even reportedly urinated in a neighbor’s garden.
By the time Bradley’s father returned home at 10pm, the house was almost in shambles. Police arrived shortly thereafter to break up the drunken shenanigans, arresting two intoxicated and unruly teenage boys in the process.
“There must have been 100 to 150 of them out there drunk, running around, jumping off cars, setting off alarms and throwing cans,” said neighbor Sue Hockey.
At the end of the day, Bradley’s father feels that social networking and the popularity of text messaging contributed greatly to his son’s ill-fated birthday party. “If it wasn’t for Facebook and BBM it wouldn’t have got out so quickly or to so many people.”
This isn’t the first time Facebook has contributed to birthday party-related madness. In 2008, nearly 400 teenagers crashed a birthday party in Britain, causing extensive property damage, not to mention making off with nearly $11,000 in jewelry and clothes.