“My daughter comes in and says, ‘Dad, there’s a drone out here flying.’”
When your daughter’s sunbathing by your family’s backyard pool and she tells you there’s a drone hovering over her, what are you going to do? Well, if you’re in Bullitt County, Kentucky, you go get your shotgun and blast that dadgum thing out of the sky:
A Hillview man has been arrested after he shot down a drone flying over his property — but he’s not making any apologies for it.
It happened Sunday night at a home on Earlywood Way, just south of the intersection between Smith Lane and Mud Lane in Bullitt County, according to an arrest report.
Hillview Police say they were called to the home of 47-year-old William H. Merideth after someone complained about a firearm.
When they arrived, police say Merideth told them he had shot down a drone that was flying over his house. The drone was hit in mid-air and crashed in a field near Merideth’s home.
Police say the owner of the drone claimed he was flying it to get pictures of a friend’s house — and that the cost of the drone was over $1,800.
Merideth was arrested and charged with first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment. He was booked into the Bullitt County Detention Center, and released on Monday.
WDRB News spoke with Merideth Tuesday afternoon, and he gave his side of the story.
“Sunday afternoon, the kids – my girls – were out on the back deck, and the neighbors were out in their yard,” Merideth said. “And they come in and said, ‘Dad, there’s a drone out here, flying over everybody’s yard.'”
Merideth’s neighbors saw it too.
“It was just hovering above our house and it stayed for a few moments and then she finally waved and it took off,” said neighbor Kim VanMeter.
VanMeter has a 16-year-old daughter who lays out at their pool. She says a drone hovering with a camera is creepy and weird.
“I just think you should have privacy in your own backyard,” she said.
Merideth agrees and said he had to go see for himself.
“Well, I came out and it was down by the neighbor’s house, about 10 feet off the ground, looking under their canopy that they’ve got under their back yard,” Merideth said. “I went and got my shotgun and I said, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless it’s directly over my property.’”
That moment soon arrived, he said.
“Within a minute or so, here it came,” he said. “It was hovering over top of my property, and I shot it out of the sky.”
“I didn’t shoot across the road, I didn’t shoot across my neighbor’s fences, I shot directly into the air,” he added.
It wasn’t long before the drone’s owners appeared.
“Four guys came over to confront me about it, and I happened to be armed, so that changed their minds,” Merideth said.
“They asked me, ‘Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am,'” he said. “I had my 40[-caliber] Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, ‘If you cross my sidewalk, there’s gonna be another shooting.'”
You tell ’em, buddy! Hell, yeah!
An armed society is a polite society, as Robert Heinlein said, and it’s certainly not polite to send your drone out snooping over other people’s property. If a man thinks you’re messing with his daughters in Bullitt County, Kentucky? You had better consider yourself lucky that your drone was the only thing he shot.
(Via Memeorandum.)
It’s no coincidence that the Great American Spirit, Bourbon, is made there.
No complaints against the four guys that were “the guy” Dwain Nuttin taking aerial pictures of “his friends house”?
Hope they weren’t “operating a motorized vehicle” while intoxicated!
$1800 for a camera drone?
The owner is lying, or wasn’t too bright…at LEAST twice!
I’d sure like to see the assorted home owners insurance claims on this.
Hell I’d have done the same thing. I don’t know that I’d have been restrained enough to stop with the drone though. Shoot. Shovel. And shut up.
But how is using one of these things any different than peeping through a bedroom window? I can shoot the SOB that’s doing that. So why shouldn’t I be able to shoot the SOB’s drone when it’s being used for the same thing?
[…] What ever happened to the Right of Privacy? Kentucky father protects family from prying eyes of high tech pervert, and gets arrested for his efforts. via R.S. McCain: […]
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-o59xNU9nm4w/VbtxX50nBuI/AAAAAAAAxdU/JCf07aVXU48/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-07-31%2Bat%2B5.59.03%2BAM.png
Bourbon inspired?
Air rights are a helluva thing.
There’s a law in Chicago, thank to Montgomery Ward, that you can’t build private property on land east of Lake Shore Drive in order to keep the lake front accessible to the public. A developer bought the air rights above a public garage on land east of there and built a huge private condo on it. The city complained and they took it to court. A judge ruled that the letter of the law applied to land, not air, and Marina City Towers is still there.
Awesome! Would happen here in my NC neighborhood as well.
I’ve shot skeet, and trap and sporting clubs but this sounds like even more fun.
I am 100% comfortable with this.
There will be confused wailing and thrashing around this tale, but I share your feelings.
Here in Massachusetts lawmakers illegalized taking upskirt photographs on public transit one week after they realized they didn’t have a law against it.
Frankly I prefer the Southern approach. Confiscate and impound the camera – with a legally owned firearm.
Honest question though… How high off the ground before aerial photographs are not an invasion of privacy?
What’s the range of a good rifle these days? How high can one of those things shoot?
I’m guessing our black-robed betters wouldn’t grant an underage girl sunbathing the same presumption of privacy as, say, a lesbian coven mass wedding.
So I think the more promising route is to argue that the drone trespassed onto the family’s property. Public airspace generally starts at 500 feet, and I highly doubt the drone was over that. (DJI’s site references an “FAA limit” of 400 feet, whatever that means, so it’s possible the drone was provably over the property.)
Sure, the owner of the drone was using it to “get pictures
of a friend’s house”. And that’s why it was hovering over a
16-year-old girl sunbathing by her family’s pool…
Creepy drone guys are lucky it’s just a damn drone that got shot.
Something tells me they’ll decline to produce the video the drone streams back…
Hey, all that she has to say is that she was laying out topless, and the drone owner was trying to take child porn pictures.
Under common law, land ownership extended from the center of the earth up to heavens. With rivers and streams, the public has a navigation easement. With advent of manned flight, something similar was established above the ground. (I have friend whose property line extends to “the center of the Mississippi River,” but that doesn’t allow him to sink the barge tows which travel through.)
I’m unaware of any recent case law regarding drones and property rights, but I would expect there to be some in short order.
1000 feet is the typical requirement by the FAA for aircraft above the ground (with some exceptions). Drones often violate that.
If the prosecutor is stupid enough to pursue the charges against Mr Meredith, all that he needs to do is say, “Fine. I demand a trial by jury.”
It’s Bullitt County, Kentucky; no jury there would ever convict him for this, and the judge is as likely as not to smack down the prosecutor for not dropping the charges.
snort.
I’d suggest for anyone in this position: get a bow and arrow or a cross bow. Equip it with a casting reel and tie a heavy line to an arrow.
You don’t need to do much damage to a drone to bring it down. And with a reel setup, you might be able to reel it in or keep it from going away when hit. This will lessen the charges that can be brought against you and provide proof of intrusion.
Maybe add a digital recording camera to the setup for evidence.
And like with this guy, make sure you’ve got friends or are armed cause the ones who are doing this for evil purposes will have the numbers.
Kinda interesting that there’s 4 guys operating that drone, huh?
Marina City towers aren’t east of Lake Shore Drive. They’re on State street fronting the Chicago River.
You may be partly right about the air rights thing but your geography is wrong.
All you need is an old but working microwave you don’t mind destroying and a little knowledge. There are a few videos on the internet of people who have made…um…tools that could fry all the electronics on the drone even at shotgun distances.
Yeppers! The County Attorney is stupid for not telling the police to quit harassing people and having them look into what those morons were doing with that drone in the first place. I’d bet they were, at a minimum committing a misdemeanor themselves.
If the drone were, say, taking a series of photos for inclusion in the county GIS, it would be a different thing. But, then, the drone would not be hovering over their back yard, or peeking under the neighbors canopy. Based on what has been reported, the drone operators were just some creeps playing a game they had no business playing and got the chop for it.
The whole story reminds of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGYNLfAZEZ4
The magnetron thing? Does that really work? And if it does would it work on the neighbors car stereo?.
Speaking from experience; wave guides are tricky and that’s what is needed to aim the electromagnetic radiation.
Plus it’s very low wattage and wouldn’t reach very far. (Microwave oven technician, Missile radar technician and electronic hobbyist speaking here)
It’s takes a pretty hefty transmitter to reach out even just a few yards. Then there’s aiming and the weight.
What might work would be a jammer but that would bring in the FCC on your Azz.
Better to use old tech and perforate that bitch.
What the drone operators were doing walks right up to the line (and may cross the line into) an offense under the New York Penal Law called ‘Unlawful Surveillance’. It’s a class E felony. It’s disturbing that these cretins apparently did not receive even a citation.
I’m curious to see if the drone owner sues. (I note that the story only mentions criminal mischief and wanton endangerment, not vandalism or whatever.)
It’s odd that it would take four men to run a drone. It kind of implies either organized crime or law enforcement. The swift arrest of the homeowner, and no mention of investigation into the drone owner, has me leaning toward the latter.
While we’re at it, the fact that the drone operators were able to locate him quickly indicates they were taking note in real time of identifying details of the properties over which the drone was flying.
One other thing. Evidently there is a federal standard which limits the easement for any kind of air traffic (takeoff and landing excepted) to altitudes higher than 500 feet. Not sure how that dovetails with Kentucky law, but Mr. Meredith would have to be quite a shot to be able to kill a drone at that distance.
https://recordsetter.com/world-record/farthest-distance-shot-clay-pigeon/18320
Law enforcement on their own time. I had a lawyer friend in Rochester who had a civil case against a mess of Irondequoit police officers who intervened in a dispute between one of their force mates and his neighbors.
“Criminal mischief” is a legal term-of-art for which the colloquialism is ‘vandalism’. It’s in New York law as well.
No it doesn’t. It implies one good ol’ boy bought a drone, and had three buddies over, watching the live feed of cute girls in their bikinis.
“upskirt photographs”… that’s for real?
I always thought that was a metaphor, like “blowing smoke up my/your skirt”…
Sounds like something market research for a panties company would do.
What strange stuff people do.
My mistake. That’s Lake Point Tower, not Marina City Towers that I’m talking about.
Actually $1800 for a specialty/high endurance or “tricked-out” drone is about right…
If he didn’t have it insured he was dumb.
If it was a hobbyist-experimental job— i.e., experimental modifications for science, or enhanced drone abilities, or somesuch— to create marketable mods… then he could get insurance, but to play “peeping tom” makes him double-plus dumb!
He should be ashamed of himself, and count himself lucky he didn’t become a permanent swampland resident!
Bingo.
And then, two 6-packs and $1800 later…
BWAHAHAHA!
This is a “feel good” story if there ever was one! I’m totally cheered up now.
I’m hitting the tip jar just for Stacy posting this one!
Ah, well if they want to build a case for the damage to the drone and not just shooting off a gun, then presumably we will eventually find out more about the owner.
Most modern rifles can kill farther than you can aim. Shooting into the air is not something to be done lightly. Shotguns of course are a different matter.
On the other hand, suggesting that if you could hit that drone those four yahoos wouldn’t be much of a target is probably a fair suggestion to make.
Jade Helm gone wrong?
Seems to me that since we have a witness to what the drone was doing prior to it being shot out of the sky, all they need is for that witness to state they’d be willing to testify to what they saw, and the prosecution rapidly falls apart.
I suspect Merideth will walk away from this.
As well he should, and it never should’ve gotten this far.
Mr. Merideth is awesome. Just like the kind of neighbor I’d like to have.
Probably not. The gummint would’ve tacked an extra two or three zeros on by the time the contractors finished billing them.
I’m a bit confused by your last paragraph, grammatically.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/justice/massachusetts-upskirt-bill/
It would have been a reasonable warning to give the yay-hoos. “I hit your drone. Think I’ll miss you?”
Ah. Well said!
Good on him!
Sounds like he is a very good shot, too.
You know those people with bass speakers the size of washing machines in their cars?
The ’79 Buick with $5k worth of stereo annoying everyone in the neighborhood?
The one’s you can hear coming 2-3 blocks away?
I’ve always thought that somebody could get rich if they were able to invent something that you could aim at that car and terminally fry their sound system. (Something besides a shotgun, I mean.)