WASHINGTON — A Kentucky man who said a drone was hovering over his yard where is teenage daughter was sunbathing, was arrested for taking it out with a shotgun.
T he $1,800 unmanned surveillance device crashed in a nearby meadow. The owner of the drone claimed he was just taking photos of a friend’s house.
The crack shot dad, William H. Merideth, 47, of Hillview, Ky., was later arrested and charged with first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment. He was booked into the Bullitt County Detention Center, and released on Monday. But he is not apologetic.
“Sunday afternoon, the kids – my girls – were out on the back deck, and the neighbors were out in their yard,” Merideth told local television news channel, WDRB. “And they come in and said, ‘Dad, there’s a drone out here, flying over everybody’s yard.'”
His daughter, who called it “weird and creepy,” finally waved at the device, and it flew away.
Meredith said when he came out it was over his neighbor’s house, “10 feet off the ground, looking under their canopy that they’ve got in their back yard,” he said. “I went and got my shotgun and I said, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless it’s directly over my property.’”
The drone came back. “Within a minute or so, here it came,” he continued. “It was hovering over top of my property, and I shot it out of the sky.”
After a tense confrontation with the drone’s owners who showed up at house afterwards, the police arrived. They arrested Meredith for illegally discharging a weapon.
“I didn’t shoot across the road, I didn’t shoot across my neighbor’s fences, I shot directly into the air,” he added.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been scrambling to make and clarify regulations as unmanned devices become more prevalent. Meredith said he had the right to shoot down the drone because it was hovering over his property and invading his family’s privacy.
“He didn’t just fly over,” he said. “If he had been moving and just kept moving, that would have been one thing — but when he come directly over our heads, and just hovered there, I felt like I had the right.”
“We need to have some laws in place to handle these things.”
