Entitled 18-Year-Old Causes Complete Chaos During Arrest

Sep 12, 2026

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He Was Eighteen by Eleven Days. That Is the Whole Story.

You have probably seen the clip. A kid in the back of a patrol car, then in a sally port, screaming, kicking, going completely to pieces while three adults try to get him through a door. The title calls him entitled. The comments are about how somebody needs to teach him a lesson.

I am the person who received him at the other end of that hallway. I have been doing booking intake for sixteen years, and I want to tell you what that night actually cost him, because it is not what anybody watching thinks, and the number that decided all of it is eleven.

He was eighteen years old by eleven days.

My name is Bernadine and everyone calls me Deenie. I work the intake desk at a county facility. I am not a deputy and I do not make arrests. I am the person on the other side of the counter at the worst hour of somebody's life, taking their information into a computer.

Here is what booking actually is, because people picture it from television and television has it wrong.

It is paperwork. That is genuinely most of it. Name, date of birth, address, emergency contact, medical questions, allergies, medications, whether you are currently under a doctor's care, whether you have thoughts of harming yourself. It is a form, and it takes about twenty five minutes with someone who is calm.

That last part is the entire hinge of everything I am about to tell you. Twenty five minutes with someone who is calm.

The kid came in on a misdemeanor. I want to lead with that because it gets lost in every version of this story.

The original charge, the thing he was actually arrested for, was minor. It was the kind of thing that in this county resolves with a fine and a court date and, for a first timer with no history, frequently gets dismissed outright or diverted before it ever sees a judge.

He would have been out in four hours. That was the trajectory when Deputy Rhoades brought him through the door.

What happened over the next ninety minutes is what created the case against him. Not the offense. The reaction to being arrested for the offense.

He fought the property search. He kicked a door hard enough to damage the frame. He refused to give his date of birth for about forty minutes, which is not defiance so much as it is a nineteen year old brain deciding that the last thing it controls is a number. He threatened people. He threatened me, personally, in language I have heard enough times that it no longer registers.

He was not violent in the way people mean when they say violent. Nobody was seriously hurt. But every one of those things is its own charge, and they stack, and by morning a kid who came in on a misdemeanor had resisting, criminal mischief for the door, and two other counts that would not have existed if he had sat down and answered a question about allergies.

That is the part that never fits in a caption. The chaos was not evidence of what he did. The chaos was what he did.

I have watched this happen several hundred times and I have never once seen anybody understand it in the moment.

Now the eleven days.

If that same night had happened eleven days earlier, almost none of it would exist now.

At seventeen, in my state, he goes into the juvenile system. Different intake, different building, different rules. His mother is contacted immediately as a matter of law. The records are confidential. The likely outcome for a first offense of that type is a diversion program, and if he completes it the whole thing closes and, in most cases, becomes eligible to be sealed or expunged.

Diversion. Confidential. Sealed. Those are the three words that were available to him on the eighth of the month and were not available to him on the nineteenth.

At eighteen he is an adult defendant in the adult system. Public docket. Public record. And a booking photograph that is a public record in this state the moment it is taken.

Same kid. Same brain. Same amount of impulse control, which at eighteen is famously not a finished product. The neurology does not update on a birthday. The legal exposure does.

I am not making an argument about what the age should be. That is a genuine policy debate and reasonable people land in different places, and I am a person who types names into a computer, not a legislator.

What I am telling you is that I watch that line get crossed constantly, and the difference between the kid who gets a sealed diversion and the kid who gets a permanent record is very often a matter of weeks, and neither of them has any idea that the line exists.

He did not know. I asked him about it much later and he had no concept of it whatsoever. He thought turning eighteen meant he could buy a lottery ticket.

The other thing that happened that night, and this is the one that has followed him furthest, is the photograph.

Booking photographs are public record here. Within roughly a day, they are scraped automatically by a category of website that exists solely to republish them, alongside the charge, in a format optimized to appear when somebody searches your name.

Not the outcome. The charge. Those sites almost never update when a case is dismissed, because the dismissal is not what generates traffic.

Several of them will, however, offer to remove it for a fee. That is the entire business model. Some states have moved against this practice with legislation and some have not, and the sites relocate and rename themselves at roughly the speed of the legislation.

So a kid with a dismissed misdemeanor and a bad ninety minutes has a photograph of the worst night of his life sitting on four commercial websites, permanently, with a price tag on its removal.

That is what the clip did not show you, and it is worth more of your attention than the kicking.

Let me tell you about the mother, because she is in the video too and the internet was extremely unkind to her.

Lorraine Alderman got to the lobby about an hour in. She was frightened and she did the thing that frightened parents do, which is arrive with volume, demanding to see her son, demanding to know the charge, demanding, and I mean this without judgment, to have some control over a situation in which she had none.

The internet decided she was the reason he turned out that way. Entitled mother, entitled son, the whole story assembled in four seconds from eleven seconds of footage of a woman in a lobby at midnight.

I have met a great many parents in that lobby. Almost all of them behave badly. It is one of the most reliable things in my job, and I stopped drawing conclusions about people from it about fourteen years ago.

Here is the thing nobody tells parents, and I wish somebody would put it on a sign. When you escalate in the lobby, you make it harder for us to release your child, not easier. Staff attention gets pulled to the front. The person who was about to walk your paperwork over stops to manage a situation.

I have seen a lobby argument add two hours to a release. I have never once seen it subtract a minute.

Now the part where I tell you why I care about this particular kid, which I should, because I have processed thousands of people and I am telling you about this one.

My brother was nineteen when he had his version of this night. Different state, different decade, a bar fight he did not start and a set of choices afterward that were entirely his own.

He is fifty two now. He is fine. He got there the long way, and the long way took about eleven years, and a substantial portion of those eleven years was spent losing jobs at the background check stage for something that had been dismissed.

That is the reason I do the one thing I do, which is very small and which I am probably not supposed to describe as policy.

When they are young, and they are spiraling, and it is going badly, I stop typing and I say one sentence. I tell them that everything they do in the next hour is going to cost them more than whatever they came in here for.

It works maybe one time in six. That number is not good. It is also not zero, and one in six of several hundred is a lot of people over sixteen years.

It did not work on Trip Alderman that night. He was too far in and I was too late.

It worked at about four in the morning, when he had exhausted himself and was sitting on a bench with his hands between his knees, and I got his date of birth and his mother's number and the answer to the allergy question.

Portia Kwan was the public defender assigned to him. She is the sort of attorney who has two hundred active files and still reads all of them, which is a kind of stamina I do not fully understand.

She got the original misdemeanor knocked down to nothing. She got two of the added charges dropped. She negotiated the rest into a deferred outcome, which meant that if he completed the conditions, the whole thing would go away.

He completed them. Every one. He was, in the language of the system, a total success story.

And then he lost an apprenticeship.

He had gotten into a trade program, the good kind, the kind that produces a career rather than a job. The employer ran a background check, and what came back was not a court record, because there was nothing left in the court record.

What came back was the photograph. From one of those websites. With the original charge listed and no outcome attached, because the site had no reason to add one.

He was not accused of lying. Nobody thought he was dangerous. The program administrator simply had eleven applicants for six positions and no appetite for a conversation with a client about it.

That is how these things actually work. Not a dramatic rejection. A slightly shorter list.

He is doing alright now. It took another two years. He works in a warehouse and he is finishing a certification at a community college, and he is twenty one and thoroughly unimpressed with himself at eighteen, which is the healthiest possible outcome.

He came to the facility about a year ago to bring me a coffee, which is against about four rules and which I accepted anyway. He told me he has never told a single person at work about any of it, and that he checks his own name in a search engine roughly once a month.

Twenty one years old, checking his own name every month.

So here is what I have, after sixteen years at that counter.

If you are ever arrested, and I hope you are not, the single most valuable thing you can do is get through the next hour without adding to it. That is not a moral instruction. It is arithmetic. The original charge is usually the smallest thing that will happen to you that night, and everything you add in the hallway is new.

Comply now, argue later. You cannot win anything in a sally port. There is no version of that argument that ends with you being released faster or the charge being reduced. Every single thing you have to say is worth infinitely more in a courtroom with an attorney than it is at two in the morning with me.

Ask for a lawyer and then stop talking. Say it once, clearly, and then say nothing else, and understand that the person on the other side of the counter is not offended by this and is often quietly relieved.

If you are a parent, do not come to the lobby to fight. Come to the lobby to sign things and give a ride. Call an attorney before you call the desk.

And if you are eighteen, or you love somebody who is, understand that the difference between a life shaped by one bad night and a life not shaped by it can be a matter of what month you were born in.

That is a genuinely stupid way to run a system and it is the system we have, and the kids passing through it have no idea it is happening to them.

The clip is below. Watch it if you want. Just know that you are watching a kid convert a four hour night into a two year one, in real time, without any idea that is what he is doing.

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When Bikers Finally Fight Back Against Rude Karens!

I Am the Karen in That Video. I Was Wrong, and Then Something Worse Happened. I want to start with the part that most people in my position skip, which is that the video is accurate. I said those things. I said them in that tone, to those men, in that parking lot, and the clip is not edited misleadingly and there is no missing context that makes me the hero. I was rude. I was loud. It is on camera and it is exactly what it looks like. My name is Charlotte and everyone calls me Char. I am forty six, I manage a dental office, and for about nine days four years ago I was one of the most hated women on the internet, which is a sentence I still cannot say out loud without something happening in my chest. Here is what happened, told properly. My mother has advanced Parkinson's and lives in a care facility about twenty minutes from my house. She uses a wheelchair, and getting her in and out of a vehicle requires a specific kind of space, which is why that building has a marked loading zone at the front with a striped access aisle beside it. That Sunday there were four motorcycles parked in the access aisle. Not the loading zone itself. The striped part beside it, which most people assume is decorative and which is actually the entire reason a wheelchair ramp can deploy. I had my mother in the van. She had a bad morning, which with Parkinson's means something I am not going to try to explain to people who have not lived with it. I had already been at the facility for four hours. I was, in the language of the internet, having a day. And I got out of that van and I did not say excuse me, and I did not say those bikes are in the access aisle, and I did not say any of the eleven reasonable things a calm person would have said. I went straight to the worst version, in the loudest voice I have, and I called four men I had never met a word I would ground my daughter for using. That is the clip. That is what people saw. What people did not see, and what does not excuse a single thing, is that ninety seconds after the camera stopped, one of those men moved his bike, and then all four of them moved, and then two of them helped me deploy the ramp because it sticks in cold weather. I did not thank them. I was too far into my own adrenaline to climb back down, and I got my mother inside and I sat in the family lounge and shook for twenty minutes. The video went up that night. By Tuesday it had five million views. By Wednesday it had been reposted into compilations with titles about bikers finally fighting back, and my face was in a thumbnail with a red circle drawn around it, and the word in the caption was the one everybody uses. I want to describe what that is actually like, because I think people imagine it as embarrassment and it is not embarrassment. It is closer to standing in a field during a hailstorm. It comes from every direction at once and there is nothing to get under. My workplace got calls. Not a few. Hundreds, over about a week, to a dental office with two receptionists, one of whom was nineteen years old and cried in the break room on Thursday because a man had described what should happen to me in detail. I was put on unpaid leave, which I do not blame them for. They had patients trying to reschedule cleanings and could not get through their own phone lines. I would have made the same call. Someone found my address. Someone else found my mother's care facility and called the front desk to ask whether they knew what kind of person had a relative living there. A woman who works nights at that facility, who has nothing to do with any of this, spent an hour on the phone with a stranger who wanted her to be outraged. And then it landed on Poppy. My daughter was sixteen. She had not been in that parking lot. She had not been in the van. She had been at a friend's house doing absolutely nothing except being a sixteen year old on a Sunday, and by Thursday her full name was in comment sections. They found her school. They found her social accounts and filled them until she deleted everything. Somebody made a fake account using her photograph. There is a particular kind of cruelty that gets aimed at teenage girls online and I am not going to reproduce any of it here, and I read all of it at the time because I could not stop myself. She stopped going to school for eleven days. She sat in her room with the door closed and I sat in the hallway outside it, and I did not have one single useful thing to say, because the honest answer to why is this happening to me was that it was happening to her because of me. That is the part I would want anybody sharing one of these videos to sit with for a second. The person in the thumbnail is not the only one who receives it. It goes to their kids, their coworkers, the nineteen year old who answers their office phone, and the night staff at their mother's care home. I deserved consequences. I want to be very clear that I am not arguing otherwise, and I have never once argued otherwise. What I could not work out then, and still cannot entirely work out now, is what my daughter did. The thing that changed the trajectory of all of this was a message from a man named Angel Dumond. Angel was one of the four riders. He was the one who filmed it, on a helmet camera he had been running that whole day, and he had shown the footage to his friends that evening the way anyone would. He did not post it. A guy they ride with, who goes by Rooster and who was not even in the parking lot, asked him to send it, and then put it up on his own account with the caption. Angel found out it existed the same way I did, which was when it was already at two million views. He messaged me on the ninth day. He said he was not writing to accept an apology and he was not writing to tell me I was a good person. He said he had seen that people had gotten to my kid, and that whatever I had said to him in that parking lot, his problem was not with a sixteen year old. Then he told me something that reframed the entire thing for me. Angel had been in a viral video himself. Six years earlier, in a completely different state, in a road rage incident where he had gotten off his bike and put his hands on a car. He had been wrong that day too, and he had been the villain of a clip that did about eight hundred thousand views, and he had lost a job over it. He said the thing that stayed with me. He said, once you have been the guy in the video, you can never really enjoy watching one again. He and Rooster had an argument about it that apparently ended their friendship for about a year. Rooster's position was that I had said what I said and I could live with the results. Angel's position was that he had been the guy in the video and knew exactly how far past the person it travels. I do not think either of them was entirely wrong, for what that is worth. Angel asked Rooster to take it down. Rooster eventually did, months later, at which point it existed on somewhere between forty and a hundred other channels and the takedown accomplished nothing. That is the thing about these clips. There is no off switch. There is no central authority. It is not on a website, it is in an ecosystem. I wrote apologies. Two of them. The first one was bad, and I want to describe why, because I think most public apologies fail in the same way. My first attempt explained about my mother. It explained about the four hours and the Parkinson's and the access aisle and the cold weather and the ramp. Every word of it was true and the entire thing was worthless, because an apology that explains is not an apology, it is a defense with softer punctuation. The second one had no explanation in it at all. It said what I said, that it was unacceptable, that the men in that parking lot had done nothing to deserve it, and that I was sorry. That one was three sentences long and it took me two weeks to be able to write it. I sent it to Angel, and he sent it to the other three, and one of them replied and two of them did not, which is entirely their right and I have never once thought otherwise. Poppy went back to school. She is twenty now. She is fine, mostly, in the way that people are fine after something like that, which is to say there is a particular kind of caution she has around the internet that she did not have when she was fifteen, and I put that there. I went back to work after six weeks. My employer was decent about it in a way I did not expect and have never adequately thanked them for. Here is where I have landed, four years out, and I offer it carefully because I know exactly what I sound like. I am not asking anybody to stop holding people accountable for behaving badly in public. I behaved badly in public. If somebody had filmed that and shown it to me, or sent it to my employer, or shown it to the four men so they could decide what they wanted to do about it, all of that would have been proportionate and I would have deserved it. What happened instead was not accountability. It was a product. Somebody took forty seconds of the worst behavior of my adult life, put a label on it, and monetized it into a two hour video, and thousands of people who will never meet me got a small pleasant hit of righteousness from it while my daughter stopped leaving her room. Those are different things. One of them is a society keeping itself in order. The other one is entertainment wearing that as a costume. And here is the part I think about most. If you had asked me, five years ago, what I thought of those compilations, I would have told you they were funny. I watched them. I sent them to people. I have almost certainly laughed at a woman in a thumbnail who was having the worst forty seconds of her year, and I never once wondered what happened to her afterward, because the format is specifically designed so that you never find out. I found out. That is the only qualification I have for writing any of this. Angel and I are not friends, which I want to be honest about because the tidy version of this story would have us become friends. We are two people who were in the same parking lot on a bad day and who ended up on opposite ends of the same machine. But we did one thing together. His riding group does a toy run every December for the children's hospital, and four years ago they were short on people to handle registration and paperwork, which is exactly the kind of tedious administrative work I am extremely good at. I have done it every year since. I sit at a folding table in a cold parking lot for six hours and check people in. Nobody there makes a thing of it. A few of them know exactly who I am and have decided it does not need to be a conversation, which is a kind of grace I did not know existed until I received it. My mother died two years ago. Angel came. He stood at the back and left before the reception, and I did not find out he had been there until somebody mentioned it a week later. So, the last thing. There is going to be another video. There is always another video, and it will be somebody having the worst forty seconds of their year, and the label in the thumbnail will already have told you what to think before the audio starts. Maybe they earned it. I earned mine. That is genuinely possible and I am not asking you to assume innocence. I am asking you to remember that there is a sixteen year old somewhere who did not earn any of it, and that she is going to get most of it anyway, and that nothing in the video will ever tell you she exists. The footage everyone saw is below. Watch it if you want. I am not going to ask you not to. Full Video