Family busts "mailbox baseball" team after high-speed chase
A family in Hatley, WI, was so fed up with the local "mailbox baseball" team that they staked out their mailbox, followed the vandals in a 100mph chase, tracked them to a gas-station, blocked them in and called the cops.
While repairing the mailbox again on Saturday, Greg Fisher suspected that it might again be targeted. Fisher, 49, and his son Dustin, 18, took watch at 2 a.m. Sunday, and their diligence was rewarded less than an hour later when a truck drove past three times. The final time, a man took a baseball bat to the mailbox.Link (via Digg)"It was frustrating watching someone smash your property," said Greg, who was in the house when the mailbox was smashed.
Dustin, who was waiting in a car in the driveway, followed the truck for more than eight miles through Hatley and onto Highway 29. As the truck reached speeds of nearly 100 mph, Dustin slowed down after getting a partial license plate number, he said.
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To be fair, one of their previous mailboxes was a huge plastic fish. The perps are lucky that they were turned over to the police. That son looks like he could be a pro wrestler.
I read that fighting back with steel posts masquerading as wood can lead to lawsuits. is this snopes-eable urban myth, or da truth?
Where I come from, "fighting back" is done with a shotgun.
Anyone putting up a fish mailbox deserves to have it smashed into tiny pieces.
Where do you come from Kyle, Doom 3?
You can't see it but I am rolling my eyes. Take a effin picture guys. High speed chases can end in far worse than a smashed mailbox. If you can't get a clear picture of the perps and a plate number, then try again.
The "taking the law into your own hands" quote at the end doesn't sit well with me... You could take them to task for pursuing at high speeds, but otherwise they just seemed to want to ID the kids. They left "the law" to the cops.
The perps are in deep, deep sheeeeit...interfering with the US mail is a Federal offense...it is very likely they will get to see the inside of a Federal prison. HA!
The best idea I have heard to combat mailbox baseball:
Take two mailboxes, one small enough to fit completely inside the larger one. Fill in the deadspace in between the two boxes with cement. Mount as normal. View the splinters of baseball bat remnants lying on the ground several days later.
I live on the outside of a curve on a busy road. My neighbors and I are constantly having to replace our mailboxes. I have been through many phases of mailbox protection philosophy, including one that weight about 40 pounds and would hopefully shatter teen-age bat-wielding hand bones.
I've settled on a shitty, cheap, loose mailbox that breaks away easily.
This kind of thing is frustrating.
If only there were a device that you could use to fix an optical image of the vandal's vehicle onto some sort of permanent storage medium. Then you could display that image, or reproduce it onto some portable material like paper, and show it to the authorities.
When they invent that device, I hope to read about it here in BB, at least when the steampunk version is released or someone knits a cover for it in the shape of a Pac Rim cartoon character.
In the meantime, this is your friend.
I am not going to lie, my friends and I did this as teenagers. The last tie we did it my friend leaned out and hit a car, and his stupid ass did it directly in front of the people who owned it. Car chase ensued and we were all ticketed.
One time they went out to do it and this same dude reached out to hit a mailbox but somehow managed to misjudge the distance and smacked his skull right into the mailbox instead.
So happy not to be a teenager anymore.
Yep, best to avoid the high speed chases...one cheap(er) way of fortifying a mailbox: buy one extra large mailbox, and another (the size you want) that fits within. Stand the big one on end, prop the smaller one (with rocks) inside the larger one, with its closed door just within the big one's door (so you can just barely close both doors completely). Fill the gap between the boxes with concrete (mind the hinges--you might want to mask them), and install on sturdy upright. Keep a lookout for splintered bat shards nearby.
Another useful version: suspend mailbox on chains from above--they swat it, it rolls with the punch, as it were.
Here in Eastern Oregon, smashing mailboxes is supposidly a crime but not to police. My dad followed one such 'smasher', got the license plate and make of the vehicle; found an officer on motorcycle patrol and gave him all the details. The officer got upset with my dad and basically told him to forget about it for he would do nothing. Ah, tax payer money at work.
I always thought about putting a large piece of ABS pipe in a large mailbox and filling in around the edges with concrete.
Then mount the thing on a steel post set in concrete.
Perfectly acceptable to post office and I would assume surprisingly painful for Casey.
But then, I never had my mailbox vandalized.
Both my father and I grew up in rural San Diego County. It seems that one of the people on the hill we both grew up on had a problem with someone backing into his mail box on a weekly basis, and destroying the mail box.
Eventually, the box owner got fed up, borrowed a bobcat tractor and dug a large but shallow hole in front of the box. He then flipped a harrow upside down and buried it so the spikes stuck up.
It seems the driver of the pickup backed up as usual, put a harrow spike through the oil pan, another into the gas tank, and hung the bottom of his transmission up on a third, got out of the truck and walked away. They towed the truck a few days later.
#11..
You can get cast or plate (instead of stamped steel) mailboxes that do the trick just as well. Also, you really don't want to do the concrete thing around your post. Especially if you live in an area that freezes. (It'll get heaved out of the ground) Really, you just need to dig the hole really deep, and fill the top part of the hole with packed gravel. The stability difference between a two foot hole and a three foot hole is enormous. Also, 6x6 posts (instead of the usual 4x4) are just as good as steel, but look way better in my opinion....
Squeem, did your friend survive the encounter?
...
I liked the suggestion made by someone writing in to the Fishers' local newspaper:
That's elegant. The reason it's hard to make invulnerable mailboxes is that they also have to function as mailboxes. A decoy mailbox doesn't. If you wanted to be extra cautious, you could make your mailbox the center of a three-mailbox row, with impervious decoy mailboxes to either side of it.I used to live in a house in Staten Island that had an outside-the-fence planting strip that ran the length of the lot. Kids walking to and from school would steal or shred just about anything you planted there. My solution was to plant several specimens of a very pretty, well-behaved antique rose variety that had extremely thorny canes. They were harmless as long as you didn't touch them. If you were determined to steal roses from them, you could -- but it took scissors or pruning shears plus a certain amount of work, and you really had to have a container to hold the cut flowers.
Has anyone tried mounting a mailbox on a rotating joint, so that it just spins if someone tries to hit it?
landmine.
No one could say for sure who put it in the box
Lived in rural Florence, Texas for a while, it's boring as HELL out there, so of course the local teens played mailbox BB.
and I got really tired of it. 4 mailboxes later, I had a solution.
purchased a large "rural" mailbox, and a smaller, 'standard' mailbox. Welded 1/4 steel plate into a box around the standard mailbox, but left the door uncovered
put large box on its back, poured in some concrete, then put modified armored mailbox INTO the large rural, and filled the edges with concrete. Let it set and cure.
attached 'superbox' to a steel plate, welded to a 2' metal rod, which then sat in a large PVC pipe full of aggregate, buried in the dirt. Not concrete, so it would account for moving earth, etc.. The Metal rod allowed the box to flex and pivot some, but not much.
the postman made a point of stopping at our house to say hello, and laugh about it when he saw it.
next saturday we found a green aluminium baseball bat on the ground near the box, a green strike point on the box, and phoned the hospital asking about any kids with broken arms the night before.
Was the local constable's SON! No, we did not press charges, no one was sued, but the son mowed our front 2 acres for a month after he healed, and I am pretty sure his father tanned his backside.
We'd had a fee more hits on the box, but last time I was in Austin, I drove out to Florence, the box is still standing.
#18 Teresa:
Yes. I think there was one in a gallery of modded mailboxes linked to from BB a couple of years ago...
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/06/survival-of-the-fitt.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/06/fortified-mailboxes-.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/21/mailboxes-that-fight.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/08/ugly-mailboxes-blog.html
Somewhere in there was a mailbox mounted on a pivot/swing arm - it was even set at a slight angle so that it returned to a native position by the road.
ever seen a quintain?
Quintain was sort of what I had in mind. Is that acceleration of car plus acceleration of baseball bat? If the car isn't moving fast, I think the flail on the other side of the pivot should hit back. This is where indelible dyes come in.
spring load it with a trigger so impact releases rotation to spray an arc of dye
You could live in a civilized country that has letterboxes!
Does anyone actually read comment threads anymore? Or just weigh in regardless of how many people have already typed the EXACT same thing before them..?
I feel that a lot people are not reading the previous comments and just posting the same again and again.
Anyway I think you should take two mail boxes and put one inside the other, pour concrete and let that sucker fly! Try tossing a double mailbox filled with concrete at a row of mailboxes. That would surely be a surprise.