An incident reported on the evening of Sept. 5 by the Healdsburg Police Department in their weekly media bulletin may have been related to a game of “Fugitive,” played by high school students in the neighborhoods between the Community Center and Badger Park.
Somewhere along Matheson Street, at about 10:30pm, a “charcoal/gray Volkswagen Passat or Honda occupied by four to five individuals” pulled into the driveway and “[its occupants] threw eggs at three juvenile females,” according to report 5209050052. Two of the girls were hiding beneath a white GMC pickup truck and one was in the truck bed. The eggs hit the tailgate of the pickup after which the car left. The owner of the pickup confronted the three girls, who left the area without providing a description of the egg-throwers.
This incident appears to have been connected to the “Fugitive” game that HHS Principal Tait Danhausen had warned students about in a campus-wide message that same day. “In short, students chase each other around town and ‘shoot’ each other with a variety of devices including Airsoft guns and Orbeez pellets,” he wrote. “These guns can look very real and have led to arrests in the past.”
Danhausen said that any student found in possession of such a gun on campus “will receive consequences based on our discipline matrix. Off-campus discipline is subject to the police.”
Contacted a few days later, Police Chief Matt Jenkins said, “The Healdsburg Police Department is aware of the student activity sometimes referred to as a ‘fugitive game’ … the Police Department routinely receives a significant number of calls related to the activity.”
He said that “an unusually high call volume placed a significant demand on limited staffing” that night, with three officers handing 25 calls for service—16 of which were directly tied to the game.
“For comparison, during the same period one week earlier, on a holiday weekend, officers handled just seven calls. This unusually high call volume placed a significant demand on limited staffing,” the Chief said.
Whose rules?
The street game Fugitive may just be an urban version of Capture the Flag, or Cops and Robbers. But the gangs are the younger classmates and the cops are the seniors, who hunt down the gangsters and, in today’s version, shoot them with paint, dye or gel.
“I’m concerned,” an area parent wrote to the police chief, school board members and others. “The ‘Fugitive’ game that happened late Friday night—where younger kids run from the Community Center to Badger Park while being chased by mainly seniors with guns—paintball guns, airsoft guns and Orbeez guns, etc. …. does it have anyone other than me concerned about children with gun-look-a-likes on the street?”
Although the parent was familiar with the Indian Huli ceremonies, which involve colored powder being thrown at others in public, this American version was troubling. “The kids are now using paintball guns and foam pellet guns that leave marks and could take out an eye,” she said. “Many of the hunters are masked, oftentimes in cars and trucks, anonymous and wearing protective gear while the hunted are not.”
She reported hearing from other parents about multiple injuries to school children that evening, from welts to physical assault, and her own fear she felt looking for her missing son that night.
Who can help?
Who then are parents to look for to help—the schools? “The fugitive game is in no way associated with the schools,” said Healdsburg Unified School District Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel. “I don’t have a lot of specifics to offer other than I know it’s been going on for some time amongst kids in Healdsburg and other communities—even other states.”
A USA Today article from a year ago was headlined, “‘Senior assassin’ trend: Authorities warn that teen game could have deadly consequences.” A Fox News report from Seattle said a teen had been killed by traffic while playing the game in 2023.
In Sonoma Valley, according to school newspaper the Dragon’s Tale, playing Fugitive is “a long-standing tradition” that can leave the campus “vandalized with egg shells, BB gun rounds, and paintball marks. In the past, injuries have happened during the event, disrupting many Sonoma citizens caught in the cross-fire.”
Despite Danhausen’s warnings, the school imposed no penalties under the “discipline matrix” because any misdeeds that occurred were off-campus. And regardless of the three-times-the-normal number of calls for service, there were no other reported citations of any related crimes.
Talk to the parents
As the principal concluded in his afternoon remarks before Friday night, “Please talk with your child about ‘Fugitive’ so that they understand the dangers of their participation and why this game is inappropriate and at times illegal.”
The Chief was in agreement. “The Police Department shares the community’s concern and emphasizes the responsibility of parents to talk with their children about the risks: potential injury, legal consequences and the confusion these devices create with real firearms,” he said.
Said the parent who wrote to the school district: “All is fun and games until a child loses an eye or is killed in traffic during a game. All is ‘just kids playing’ until an actual gun is used.
“The normalization of these actions (carrying, brandishing and using a weapon against humans in an unsanctioned public space) can lead to normalization of carrying a real gun into a real situation and taking a real life,” she wrote.
Perhaps it’s the sort of thing, like Prank Night just before the HHS graduation, that seems more dangerous than it is. But injury, whether suffered or imposed, is never really that much fun.
