If you happened to be at the Irvine Spectrum Monday night, you might have heard some loud pops.
No, this was not misdirected Dolby blasts from the shopping and entertainment center's cine-megalopolis.
Just ask the two Mission Viejo teens arrested for making the racket.
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Irvine Police were called to the center at 115 Fortune just before 10 p.m. Monday by security
officers who'd been hot on the trail of two young men.
They had been seen exploding three small plastic water bottles at various Irvine Spectrum locations.
But when the mall cops tried to stop to the lads for a chat, the pair darted off, jumped into a vehicle and sped away.
However, a license plate number was obtained and passed on to
police.
That eventually led Irvine Police to the respective Mission Viejo residences of 18-year-old's Kyle McCann and Jason Mathewes, who were placed under arrest.
According to Irvine PD, the arrestees had mixed household chemicals into the water bottles that caused the re-capped bottles to expand and pop.
That, according to cops, made them destructive devices worthy of the intervention of personnel from the Hazardous Devices
Section of the Orange County Sheriff's Office, which responded as a precaution
and also assisted in collecting evidence.
On the bright side, looks like at least two students passed summer school chemistry.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.