He rode horses, hunted and took part in adult-supervised "demolition derby" auto races, but was hardly a risk addict. College-bound, a pole-vaulter who also subbed on the basketball team, he had little to prove. He was no self-destructive brooder - "a bouncy, real nice guy," remembers Cathy Willis, the high schools student-activities coordinator. Most disturbing for parents is that Michael seemed a perfectly normal teen. It's not the most exciting place to be if you're a teenager." Mimi Mahon, a nursing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, offers the truism that "kids believe they are impervious to injury." Patricia Shingledecker, Michael's mother, suggests helplessly, "All people somewhere are looking for a thrill." "They're probably bored," says local psychologist Robert Craig. I wasn't even thinking of getting hit."Īdults are reduced to hazarding standard, sad guesses about what motivates these daredevils. Says Mott: "All my friends were doing it, so I did it. When they saw headlights, most bolted, but a few stayed pat. On Halloween two years ago, she recalls, she and 20 other kids took turns arranging themselves like sardines across a road. "I've done it," says Lona Mott, a ninth-grader at Franklin Area High School, from which Shingledecker graduated last spring. In rural Polk, 80 miles north of Pittsburgh, people had more trouble making sense of the tragedy - not just because they were closer to Shingledecker, but because some realized that for at least two years, without the benefit of any cinematic model, Venango County youths have been lying down in the middle of the street, daring the cars to come. And on Capitol Hill, Shingledecker haunted a long-scheduled Commerce Committee hearing on screen violence, where Attorney General Janet Reno took off after a brace of entertainment executives. But the next weekend, he tried the same stunt himself on the double yellow line in the middle of Pennsylvania Route 62 - and was hit by a pickup truck.Īlmost immediately his fate was appropriated by columnists and talk-show hosts, who compared Shingledecker with the five-year-old alleged to have been under the influence of MTV's Beavis and Butt-head cartoon when he started a fatal fire. Shingledecker did not seem especially moved by the film, his girlfriend reports. Early in the film, its hero, a college quarterback, tries to prove grace under pressure by lying down in the middle of a busy highway flipping through a magazine as the trucks swerve to avoid him.
#Lie down in darkness movie#
10, he and three carloads of friends saw the movie The Program at a drive-in theater not far from his home in rural Stoneboro, Pennsylvania. Shingledecker's death was easy to portray as a clear-cut case of cause and effect. He was killed just as the debate was heating up once more about pop culture's effect on young people and raising some old questions: Just how vulnerable, how suggestible, are these young consumers? Will they parrot anything they see done on a screen? And if so, who's responsible?
#Lie down in darkness how to#
For Michael Shingledecker's friends and family, everybody seemed to know exactly how to interpret the 18-year-old's death last week.
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