Many folks have landlords they don’t get along with, whether it’s because landlords are sometimes sticklers for “rent money” and may not be impressed by certain flashes of interior redesign, such as punching your hand through a wall.
But we’re not used to a tenant being so pissed off as to allegedly send 317 harassing text messages to his landlord and then leaving a bomb in the house you’re renting, as David Jeremy Smith is accused of doing. Bryan police arrested Smith last month, a day after the College Station Police Bomb Squad dismantled the “homemade” bomb.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a hold of anyone in Bryan-College Station to tell us more about this hand-crafted exploding device, but we’re just glad it didn’t go boom. However, there was damage inside the house, which was described as “vacant” in a Bryan police report: “The walls were all damaged and there was sprayed on graffiti on almost every wall in the whole house. The damage done to the inside of the house was estimated at $10,000.”
This was all enough for a Brazos County grand jury to indict the
30-year-old Smith on charges of felony criminal mischief and a “class A
misdemeanor related to [the] bomb hoax” on December 18, according to The Bryan-College Station Eagle. Smith’s
been at the Brazos County Jail since his arrest, in lieu of $152,000
bail. (The newspaper reported that, per police accounts, Smith texted
his landlord 317 times in about five months).
So let that be a lesson to all you unhappy renters out there. If you
don’t like your landlord, it’s always better to move than it is to try
to blow up their property.
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2009.
