The father of a San Mateo high school girl now faces criminal charges after he allegedly opened fire on a car full of high school boys on Saturday.
The incident happened overnight on Saturday, just after midnight, and as KRON4 reports, three boys who are students at Hillsdale High School were in an SUV that allegedly had targeted the same house on Annapolis Drive in San Mateo two days earlier. In the earlier incident, the boys allegedly spread oil "all over the porch," as one of multiple pranks they were allegedly pulling on different classmates.
The female classmate whose home they targeted twice was, her father said, the target of "constant bullying" at Hillsdale High. And the father, 54-year-old Craig Steven Miceli, appears to have gotten fully fed up on Saturday when the egging occurred.
According to San Mateo County prosecutors, Miceli fired two rounds at the boys' SUV, and one bullet struck the front passenger quarter panel of the vehicle.
It's not clear who called the police, but San Mateo police officers responded to the scene and stopped the SUV and were questioning the boys when Miceli approached the officers. According to the DA's office, the father told police he was tired of his daughter being bullied, and was "angry he was having to spend time cleaning oil off [his] porch."
Miceli further told officers he had been aiming for the tires of the SUV, and after firing the shots he had tossed the handgun into Water Dog Lake in Belmont, several miles away.
As KRON4 reports via the DA's office, officers subsequently served a search warrant at Miceli's home and found a different weapon, an illegal .50 Browning machine gun rifle, as well as multiple types of ammunition.
Miceli has now been charged with three counts of assault with a firearm, shooting at an occupied vehicle, possession of an assault weapon, and unlawful assault weapon activity. His bail was set at $25,000 at an arraignment Tuesday, and he has a preliminary hearing scheduled for June 9.
The incident comes at a time when teens have been met with violence around the country when performing pranks like this for TikTok audiences. Three weeks ago, a Virginia man allegedly shot and killed an 18-year-old who was pulling "ding-dong ditch" pranks with two friends, and filming it for TikTok. And two years ago, a Southern California man, Anurag Chandra, was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for the fatal shooting of three teenagers in January 2020 who had pulled a "ding-dong ditch" prank at his home.
Photo via Google Street View
