Kyle Steffen had a problem. Kids in his Wyoming, Minnesota neighborhood kept cutting across his lawn on their bikes on the way to Goodview Park, and years of yelling out the window hadn’t changed a thing, so he tried something new. A trap.
Specifically: a plastic sheet studded with roughly 40 three-inch screws, points up, hidden flush with the grass along the path kids had worn into his yard. Police say it worked exactly as intended. It also got Steffen charged with setting a spring gun, pitfall, deadfall, or snare trap, which is apparently a real statute in Minnesota, and now he’s due back in a Chisago County courtroom later this month.
Let me head off the obvious pile-on before it starts. Cutting through someone’s private lawn without asking is annoying, and if it happens daily for years, I understand the temptation to do something drastic. Property lines exist for a reason. But there’s a giant, unmissable gap between an annoyed homeowner and a guy who engineers a device meant to injure children, and Steffen didn’t just cross that gap. He sprinted across it.
There’s a fence. There’s a sign. There’s a call to the city, since this shortcut apparently runs along a route kids have used for ages. There’s even just standing on the porch and staring until the kids get uncomfortable enough to reroute, which, from personal experience, works better than people expect. None of those options end with a screw through a kid’s foot and a criminal complaint with your name on it.
What actually gets me about this story is the escalation math. A guy gets mad about grass, which ranks near the bottom of things worth going to war over, and instead of dialing the response down, he engineers something built to draw blood. Not scare. Injure. He told police the trap hadn’t stopped the kids and he’d set it anyway, which means he wasn’t defending his yard anymore. He was just angry, and he wanted something to show for it.
We’ve all had a version of the lawn moment: the neighbor who parks in your spot, the dog that treats your flowerbed like a bathroom, the shortcut that wears a bald patch into grass you paid to seed. The irritation is legitimate. What’s supposed to stop most of us from turning that irritation into a felony-adjacent booby trap is, frankly, just being a decent person, and it’s a lower bar than Steffen managed to clear.
He goes back to court soon, and I have no idea what a judge does with someone who admits on the record that his trap didn’t work and he left it out anyway. I do know that if your fix for kids being on your lawn involves hardware, you’ve already lost the argument. Probably the yard too.
My two cents: a fence costs less than a court date, and it doesn’t require explaining to a judge why you wanted screws pointing up at kids.