Teen Violence Made Popular Online

Dec. 7, 2007— -- Three teenage boys from New Jersey were bored one evening, so they decided to take a drive: a mean drive. While cruising down the street they spotted innocent bystanders on the side of the road and shouted out obscenities. It was one of many outings.

To a woman washing her car, they screamed, "Wash that car, you filthy skank!"

To a guy wearing a bathing suit, they said, "Put on some clothes, you sick bastard!"

These are the nicer insults -- most are simply too vulgar to publish.

Teenage boys behaving badly has been around since, well, since there have been teenage boys. But now, technologically savvy young people have a new way to act out. They bring along their video cameras or video phones, record what they're doing and then upload their pranks for the whole World Wide Web to see. That's what the boys in New Jersey were doing and their videos have become popular spots on YouTube.

,One of their YouTube videos, added just in time for the holidays, shows the boys screaming at some children, "There's no such thing as Santa Claus! Ha ha ha!"

"We know it's wrong, we know it's mean, we know we're cowards, but, like, that's the reason why we're doing it," said one of the drive-by participants, Steven Bogda, now 20 years old.

"2020" wanted to know what they told their parents before they went out and did this. Surely they didn't say, "Hey Mom, I'm going out to yell at people. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Well, at first when I was younger, I didn't tell her," said Bogda's friend and former accomplice, 20-year-old Tom Del Guercio. "But eventually she was like, 'Just don't get in trouble,' pretty much."

When asked if his mother was proud, Del Guercio laughed and said he didn't know.

The boys' drive-by videos have become wildly popular on the Internet, attracting more than 6,000 fans on MySpace alone.

"We get messages every day saying, I want another video, give us another video," Del Guercio said. "We get like about 20 new friends every day on MySpace requesting to be our friend."

If it weren't so mean-spirited, it's understandable that boys would find such impromptu, improvisational comedy appealing.