Hotel pranksters promote hotel destruction
The woman in a hotel room near Orlando International Airport was called by someone who claimed to be a front-desk clerk. There was a gas leak in their room. The hostel guest frantically relayed information to her husband about smashing the windows of their room with a toilet.
Then the caller told them to break the mirror on the wall…then to bash in the wall…then to throw the mattress out the window.
"When I broke the window, I got suspicious," the man said. "It didn’t seem right, but she [his wife] was panicking, so I continued."
By this time the Orlando couple began to be suspicious: They had become the latest victims of a prankster who are nationwide duping hotel guests into doing outrageous destruction of hotel rooms, including breaking hotel windows to test fire alarms.
The incident follows others from across the country reported in The Orlando Sentinel.
—In Arkansas, a caller posing as a sprinkler-company employee persuaded a motel employee to do more than $50,000 in damage to a motel as part of a "test" of the motel’s emergency alarms.
—At a Comfort Suites in Daphne, Ala., a caller ordered a guest to turn on the sprinklers for a fire that wasn’t. The result: more than $10,000 in damages.
—In Nebraska, a Hampton Inn employee was convinced by a caller to pull the fire alarm, later telling him the only way to silence the alarm was by breaking the lobby windows. The employee enlisted the help of a nearby trucker, who drove his rig through the front door.
One culprit bragged about the misdeeds on Twitter: "I just pulled off the most epic prank. I had a hotel guest back his truck into the hotel front window, and break the window."
The crime is a second-degree misdemeanor though prosecuting pranksters will be hard, says Bob Dekle, a law professor at the University of Florida.
This was not the first such incident in Orlando. A hotel guest set off the sprinkler system at the Best Western Airport Inn earlier in the year.
There’s not much police can do to identify whoever did it but tourism officials worry there are more than 470 hotel properties and 114,000 rooms in the Orlando area.
Report by David Wilkening
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