'Is this person trying to break-in?': Person kicks Cambridge door as part of social media trend
A Cambridge woman who caught a person on camera kicking her door as part of a social media trend has since received an apology for the incident.
Kylie Sousa was visiting her parents in Cambridge two weeks ago when she got a notification from her home security system, showing a person kicking her door.
“At first I thought like, is this person trying to break into my house?” said Sousa.
Looking at the footage again, she realized it appeared to be something else,.
"An individual coming up to our front door, turning around and basically donkey kick our front door,” she said.
A similar incident happening in Port Dover last weekend, where three youths are seen filming themselves knocking and then kicking open a door before running away.
The door kicking is a trend rising in popularity on social media platforms like TikTok.
In a statement to CTV News, a spokesperson for TikTok says in part, "we expect our community to create responsibly and will remove content that encourages vandalism and other criminal activities."
Police are now coming out with a message and warning.
“There are some significant charges there. So we need our youth to understand the fact that they need to be held accountable for their actions,” said Sgt. Ed Sanchuk of the West Region Ontario Provincial Police.
According to Waterloo regional police, if caught, charges could include mischief under the Criminal Code, trespassing under the Trespass to Property Act and trespassing at night under the Criminal Code.
Aimee Morrison, a social media expert and associate professor at the University of Waterloo, said the young people engaging in these social media trends are often seeking peer approval from a wider audience.
“Sometimes when we're engaging in these so called pranks where you're actually doing damage and scaring people are not really thinking of the people in the immediate area as being the audience for what we're doing we're thinking of the internet,” said Morrison.
APOLOGY GIVEN FOR DOOR KICKING
On Thursday, Sousa reached out to CTV News to say that she has recieved an apology for the door-kicking incident.
"He told me that he saw the reaction and how uneasy it made us feel and he just wanted me to know that it was just something silly he was doing with his friends," she said. "I was a little bit shocked, I told him I was surprised and happy he was brave enough to come and apologize face to face. That takes a lot of courage."
Sousa adds the boy who did it was is only 15 years old, lives out of town, and had to take two buses to come back to her house to apologize. He assured her that he would never do something like that again.
She says she has no intentions of pressing charges and is happy to have some closure to the situation.
