A group of delinquent teens in North St. Louis learned about mob justice the hard way. After taking the TikTok challenge to swipe a Kia, two boys, aged 14 and 16, were shot. They were involved in the grand theft auto of an Optima but not a whole lot is known about the shooting.
Two St. Louis teens shot
Around 3 p.m. on Monday, October 31, a group of five teens stole a woman’s Kia Optima from her North St. Louis home. She didn’t take it lightly and wasn’t expecting the cops to do a whole lot about it, so went scouting the neighborhood in pursuit of vigilante justice.
As related to the press, a family member notified the owner her car “had been stolen.” That’s when the woman who owned it and “another person” commenced to “tracking the car.” All the names have been withheld to protect the guilty.
The posse soon spotted the missing car “at a gas station in the 6000 block of West Florissant Avenue.” They didn’t bother wasting time with the police, instead the pair “attempted to block it in.”
Police note, in the report which they eventually did write up, that the “woman said she then heard gunshots and took cover.” The suspect teens “fled in the Kia.” Obviously, that’s not an ideal vehicle for evading hot pursuit.
Once again, they closed in on the car “in the 7000 block of Glenboro Drive in Flordell Hills, a small city in north St. Louis County.” That’s about when police got involved. By the time they arrived on scene, they “found the 14-year-old suspect nearby suffering from gunshot wounds.”
The 16-year-old had already “been taken to a hospital by private vehicle with gunshot wounds.” A third suspect was captured by police, while two more teens are still at large.
Nobody said a word
Not a single one of the captured suspects would say a single word to police about what happened. The teens won’t even tell them who was doing the shooting. “It was unclear if the woman whose car was stolen, the person with whom she was tracking the car, or someone else fired shots during the encounters.”
Nobody else is talking either. Justice is something that St. Louis residents are handling on their own. Police only get in the way.
That was actually the second incident the same day where someone used GPS to track the stolen car of a family member.
No teens were involved in that incident but “a man used GPS to track down a family member’s car that was stolen in Sunset Hills, then shot at the suspects on Highway 40 (Interstate 64).
Thanks to a post on TikTok, teens have been stealing Kias and Hyundais for kicks. Especially in the St. Louis area where police have been defunded and demoralized into uselessness. Many local juveniles “take advantage of a design flaw that makes some models of those cars easier to steal.”
They may be easy to steal and GPS makes them just as easy to find. In those neighborhoods, they’ll cap you for wearing the wrong shoes. Swiping someone’s ride is a suicidally reckless decision.
