By Marianna Kocharyan
It started out as a dating activity, but ended with $82-trespassing tickets all round.
Fourteen BYU students and three others were cited for trespassing by police for throwing milk jars filled with gasoline down a mineshaft just southwest of Provo.
On April 16th at 1:03 a.m., Provo police officers issued trespassing citations to 17 students at the Bergin Mine area, Elberta, an unincorporated town south of Provo.
The mine itself is private property and has been vacant for over 10 years. It has become a local hot spot for students looking for alternate activities. One of those activities includes dropping things, sometimes homemade ?bombs?, down abandoned mine shafts.
The 17 students on this occasion were use milk jars they had collected over a week. Some of those students were dates that did not even know what they were going to do until they got there.
As well as citing the students for trespassing, the officers called the Honor Code Office at BYU and reported the group.
One of the students said they were not aware the area was private property and they only noticed signs after they had been cited.
?There is a wire fence on the property you can barely see and two very small ?no trespassing? signs that are about a foot high, basically hidden behind the bushes,? the student said. ?There is a gate to the fence that is lying on the bushes. There was no lock on the gate, no proper signs.?
However, Sgt. Deke Taylor disagreed.
?They were in an area that was clearly marked, basically a no trespassing area and it?s not only that, it?s a very dangerous area,? Taylor said. ?We had people falling in the mine shaft all the time and there are gases in mine shafts that are omitted that can be fatal if they are inhaled, or that can cause an explosion if lighted material is dropped into them.?
Taylor also said the Utah County Sheriff?s office routinely conducts patrols of that area for safety reasons as burglaries occur quite often there.
?We absolutely are enforcing trespass laws,? Tailor said. ?These students don?t realize that by doing what they were doing ? lighting material and dropping them in the mine ? that they could have been arrested and put in jail, but they weren?t.?
Kerry Jenkins, BYU spokesperson, said trespassing is regarded as part of the upholding the law, which is in the Honor Code.
?Our main concern is for safety of the students,? Jenkins said.
