STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — It was around 11:15 p.m. Saturday when Assemblymember Michael Reilly was returning home after celebrating his and his wife’s 25th anniversary, when he observed five teenagers loitering near a home in the vicinity of Lyndale Avenue and King Street in Eltingville.
The residence’s long, white vinyl fence had a large rectangular section knocked out, and loose boards lay scattered in the backyard, in what appeared to be another case of the Kool-Aid Man challenge.
The challenge is just one of many social media-based trends that encourage adolescents to intentionally vandalize property, and is believed to be based on a series of 1970s and ’80s commercials in which the soft drink mascot would make an abrupt entrance by crashing through a wall and saying his catchphrase: “Oh, yeah!”…