Deviant interview concepts and methodologies

Deviant Interview

This interview took place in the second week of March 2012, on the front porch of a house where "Ralph" lives with his parents. The parents were out of town and I ran a digital recorder after promising him his real name would not be used. My note taking leaves a lot to be desired so he agreed to the digital recording of the interview. Ralph (not his real name) was two years out of high school, taking some online courses and working part time at a restaurant. He was hoping to get his community college two-year degree. A big gray tabby cat sat on his lap and the sight of him petting that cat made the picture seem very mellow and innocent, although the deviant acts he and his two friends were involved with were not mellow and not innocent.

The deviance that "Ralph" got involved in was, to him, just a high school stunt, nothing seriously antisocial, he told himself through his junior and into his senior year. He and his friends "Nick" and "Derek" would have a few beers at a party then get in Nick's sub-compact car and drive around until they came to an intersection with stop and go lights. This usually took place at night or early in the morning, and the small town with not too much traffic made it "not very risky," Ralph said in the interview, to just roll right through the red light -- looking straight ahead -- as though the red light wasn't there.

"We loved running red lights," Ralph said. "We would all be rolling video on our three cell phones as we ran the red light and later we would go do Derek's house to watch the three videos of our car running the red light. We had agreed not to look both ways to see if any other cars were coming. It was strictly a game of "chicken" and the idea was to just be reckless and take a chance no one was coming.

"By being in the back seat, I could get both my buddies in the front seat into the frame and the also in the video. The video showed both boys looking straight ahead as the car headed through the red light, and later as we watched the videos on Derek's parents wide-screen television in their basement family room, we laughed and sneaked shots of his dad's bourbon."

Ralph explained in great detail how they would edit the three videos into some kind of montage, and produce a "polished video" to show next time their other "wild friends" were hanging out at Derek's parents' house. They put music into the last video they made just before the "accident" that took Nick and Derek's lives a year ago this past January. They used Beethoven's 5th symphony in that last video, which made the sight of high school boys running a red light more dramatic.

He asked me if I'd like to see that last video, the one just before the accident, and I said I would, but "…let's finish the interview first," I suggested.

"When did this game of chicken start and why did you guys feel the need to do it?" I asked. I never used the word "deviant" but instead told Ralph it was for a class I was taking in psychology -- why kids take chances was the assignment, I told him.

He said his big sister had a VHS video of an old James Dean movie, "Rebel Without a Cause," and in that movie James Dean and the school bully play "chicken run" by driving their cars side-by-side towards a cliff. The first one to open the door and bail out before the car plunges over a cliff is a "chicken," Ralph explained. That's where they got the idea of running red light as a stunt.

"Nick was best at it," Ralph explained. "He was fearless. When he played baseball in high school, he was fearless then too. When he was up to bat, he would crowd the plate and like, dare the pitcher to hit him. He got hit by pitched balls a lot but boy he could smash the ball when it was over the plate to his liking." Ralph remembered that Nick was a left-handed pitcher and he would deliberately throw the first pitch at the batter's head to get him "loose"; umpires have actually thrown Nick out of games, Ralph went on, "for throwing at guys on purpose, and hitting some of them in the head with fastballs."

On that early January morning, a Sunday morning, the three high school pals had been to a Saturday night party, and they got into Nick's little car and headed to do some red-light running. "I was really tired and I knew my mom might wait up for me so the boys dropped me off at my house," Ralph explained. Then the two went to the intersection of elm and Highway 14, the busiest highway running through their town, and, Ralph explained, "Nick was itching to do a chicken run that morning and I count my lucky stars I had them drop me off first."

When Nick and Derek breezed into that intersection, through the red light at 5 in the dark of a pre-dawn morning, they did not know there was a big pickup truck heading into the intersection from their left, moving at what later was estimated at 55 to 60 miles per hour. The pickup struck Nick's little car square in the driver's side.

"The impact was so intense, Nick's car was thrown about 70 feet off Highway 14, into a tree," Ralph explained, his eyes looking watery like he was about to be shedding tears. "Both of my friends were killed instantly. Their parents were devastated. The whole school was in mourning for several weeks. I heard that Nick's cell phone was recovered and the rumor was that the video of him running that last red light was retrieved by highway patrol investigators, but I never could confirm that." How could a cell phone still be operating after that collision? I asked.