Police say Diboll senior prank crossed the line
9 football players arrested, charged; 1 arrest pending
By JESSICA SAVAGE
The Daily Sentinel
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Nine Diboll High School senior football players were arrested Monday morning and charged with burglarizing a campus building, a felony offense, after allegedly participating in a senior prank March 6.
"It was wrong, and it crossed the line, so we have to pursue it as such," said officer Jake Denman, chief of police for the Diboll Independent School District.
The following were arrested and charged with burglary of a building: Draylen Fussell, 18; Jarrod Christmas, 18; Carlos Nunez, 18; Ben Charles Beaty, 17; Sean Havard, 18; Michael Mitchell, 17; Jayce Murry, 18; Courtney Tillman, 17; and Winston Ives, 18.
One other student's arrest is also pending, authorities said.
All would likely be placed on school suspension, according to Diboll ISD Athletic Director Gary Martel.
The 10 seniors allegedly arrived on campus late at night on March 6 and broke into a campus building.
Denman would not share details of the prank, stressing he did not want to encourage copy-cat incidents.
"This is not a simple prank," he said.
Custodial staff and administrators discovered the prank early on the morning of March 7 and called in extra staff to help clean up the campus before the start of the school day.
The cleanup postponed school by about 10 minutes, Denman said.
"The school did a good job cleaning up and keeping the students from seeing it," he said.
Senior pranks are a tradition at most American high schools. They are usually organized by a group of 12th-grade students who often wrap their school campus in toilet paper or string underwear up a campus flagpole.
Martel confirmed the students arrested were senior athletes, most of them honor students.
"It was a senior prank that got out of hand," Martel said. "If they had stayed outside the building and just wrapped the lumberjack statue or ran underwear up the flagpole ... that's where the prank should have stopped. But once they went inside the building, it was considered breaking and entering, and it escalated from there."
He said most of the students had already called him and apologized.
"They owned up to it. It was something that was meant to be funny when it started out, and it turned out to be not funny at all."
Calls to administrators at Diboll Independent School District for comment were unsuccessful. The administration office is closed for spring break.
City Editor Gary Willmon contributed to this report.
