A Stone’s Throw Man Arrested For Throwing Rocks At Teens Who He Says Were Harassing His Family

Billie Phillips says the teenage boys had been harassing his family for months and he was just trying to make them stop.

When the two carloads of obnoxious teens returned to the family’s Valley home for a third middle-of-the-night visit the last weekend in May, Phillips and a friend were waiting outside. The teens swerved through Phillips’s gravel driveway and across his yard, then sped down the street. When they turned around to make another pass, Phillips and his friend grabbed a few baseball-sized rocks and hurled strikes as the cars roared by again. They broke the back window of one and dented fenders on both.

“We weren’t thinking,” Phillips said. “Except that we were going to stop ‘em for the cops.”

Indeed, the cars stopped and sheriff’s deputies, summoned by the third call they received that night from Phillips’s wife, Debbie Larson, responded. But it was Phillips, 49, and his friend Randy Nagy, 36, who were arrested for malicious mischief.

Deputies told the teenagers - all juveniles - to go home.

Phillips spent three days in jail, but he says the time served seems to have been well spent.

There have been no incidents of harassment for nearly two weeks, including last weekend, and Phillips hopes the seriousness of his actions may have sent the boys a message.”If me going to jail stops them, then it will be worth it,” Phillips added.

Sheriff’s Department spokesman Lt. Dave Wiyrick says he can sympathize with Phillips and his family - but only to a point.

“They have been coming by late at night,” Wiyrick said. “If I lived there, I would probably be upset too.”

But Wiyrick said an anti-harassment order against the teenagers would have been a better solution to the problem than throwing rocks.

“It’s kind of like an order of protection,” Wiyrick said. “If there’s an anti-harassment order … and if we see anything unlawful we will arrest them.”

The three boys at the center of the harassment accusations and their parents all declined to comment.

The trouble began with a dispute between Phillips’s and Larson’s son, Tyson Larson, a sophomore at Central Valley High School, and another boy, a CV High senior, over Tyson’s girlfriend. The older boy asked the girl to go out with him. She refused. He kept calling and asking for a date. She kept saying no.

“He was being a little pest,” said the girl’s mother, who asked not to be identified. “I had my daughter’s phone taken out because of it. He was very persistent.”

Tired of having his girlfriend badgered by the boy, Tyson told the older boy to leave her alone. The two met up after school in the CV High parking lot and fought.

Later that night, the older boy and several of his friends went to the girl’s house. They told her father they were looking for Tyson.

The girl’s father told them that Tyson wasn’t there and asked them to leave. The girl’s mother said one boy threatened her husband with a handgun. The father backed off and called the Sheriff’s Department, but the kids were gone before deputies arrived. The family filed a report, but Wiyrick said deputies were unable to track down the boys.

There were a couple of small scuffles at school, but nothing major happened in the next couple of weeks. Just when it seemed that maybe the trouble was blowing over, things blew up again.

“That’s when the bad stuff started happening,” Larson said. “They started coming onto our property.”

She said her son and her family were threatened at home and their yard was vandalized.

“We’ve called the police every incident that we’ve had,” Larson said. “I’ve had several officers out here. We’ve turned in license plate numbers.”

Larson said she called deputies three times on the night her husband was arrested. “I said they’re back again. And every time the cops would drive by, these young kids were like three minutes right behind the cops. It was like they were playing a cat and mouse game.”

But Wiyrick insists deputies’ hands are tied. “We enforce the law, but if there hasn’t been a violation we can’t do too much,” he said.

After the rock-throwing incident, Phillips said, the father of one of the boys involved came over to his house. “He wanted to talk to the kid who (threw the rocks),” Phillips said, who responded: “You’re looking at him.”

The two ended up talking about what happened that night - and what had been happening earlier. “He was a very nice gentleman … and he found out. Instead of a bunch of lies, he found what the hell was really going on. I’d like to talk to all their parents.”

But Phillips said most - if not all of the parents - are not aware of what is going on, even though the sheriff’s department has been involved.

“We’ll take a report from the juvenile, but unless they have been arrested, we don’t necessarily contact the parents,” Lt. Wiyrick said.

Larson said the rock-throwing incident was out of desperation.

“They resorted to rocks,” Larson said. “It wasn’t right. But where does it stop?”

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