Don't Think, Just React

If you're an idiot, take comfort that there are folks out there dumber than you.

Lisa Kantorski took the call from the person who claimed to be a front-desk clerk about a gas leak in their hotel room near Orlando International Airport. She frantically relayed the information to her husband, Mark, an Indian River County deputy. He followed the caller’s instructions … and smashed the window of his room with a toilet tank.

“When I broke the window, I got suspicious,” Mark said. “It didn’t seem right, but she [Lisa] was panicking, so I continued.”

The Kantorskis had no idea they were the latest victims of a prankster — or pranksters — whose tricks are popping up across the nation. The unknown antagonists dupe folks people into doing outrageous things, including driving trucks through storefronts and breaking hotel windows to test fire alarms. With Lisa clutching their three kids (instead of just leaving the room?), Mark listened to the caller as he barked out more instructions:

Break the mirror on the wall. Check.

Use the lamp to bash in the wall to get to the trapped man on the other side. OK.

Throw the mattress out the window and jump for safety. Out the mattress went.

Room 204 of the Hilton Garden Inn on South Semoran Boulevard was a shambles.

“I’m not one to argue much with her,” Mark said. “When you slow down everything, the situation was kind of odd.”

The Kantorskis never got the chance to jump (sadly for us, who whould have had benifited from a now stronger human gene pool). Hilton Garden Inn manager Samir Patel appeared at the door to address a noise complaint, and broke the news to the Kantorskis: There was no gas leak. When police officers arrived, Patel said he recently received a memo from his corporate office warning about “dangerous pranks” pulled at hotels in other states. Police don’t know who called the Kantorskis, who were not arrested “because he was responding to what he believed to be an emergency,” said a police spokeswoman.

The incident follows others from across the country:

•In Arkansas, a caller posing as a sprinkler-company employee persuaded a motel employee to do more than $50,000 in damage to a motel as part of a "test" of the motel's emergency alarms.

•At a Comfort Suites in Daphne, Ala., a caller ordered a guest to turn on the sprinklers for a fire that wasn't. The result: more than $10,000 in damage.

•In Nebraska, a Hampton Inn employee was convinced by a caller to pull the fire alarm, later telling him the only way to silence the alarm was by breaking the lobby windows. The employee enlisted the help of a nearby trucker, who drove his rig through the front door.

The Nebraska incident appears to be memorialized online by PrankNET. Videos posted by PrankNET record an incident nearly identical to the one pulled on the Kantorskis.

"We cannot even access the upper levels until you break out the window to make a negative air flow. ... We're going to have to ask you to break the window. Don't worry; we're moving you into a different room," a male prankster tells the obedient hotel guests.

Well, you may wanna have someone look into them, in case checking phone records becomes too difficult...