McCain signs being stolen? Electrify them!

A homeowner had had enough and figured out a clever way to prevent his McCain signs from being stolen...

Sign battle starts with a zzzzzzzt!
Jay Price, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL - After Shawn Turschak saw two sets of McCain-Palin signs disappear from his yard within  hours of being planted, he took steps to protect the latest pair.

On Monday, he ran wires from his house and hooked the signs into a power source for an electric pet fence. Then he mounted a surveillance camera in a nearby tree and wired it to a digital recorder.

Tuesday afternoon, the camera saw this: A neighbor trotting up with an Obama-Biden sign, grabbing a handful of volts as he touched a McCain-Palin sign, then fleeing at top 9-year-old boy speed.

A few minutes later, the boy's father, Andrew Noble, was at Turschak's door, demanding an explanation from Turschak's 13-year-old daughter, who called her parents on the phone to say a man was yelling at her. Both families agree on one aspect of the exchange, that Noble chastised her for "electrocuting" his son, then left.

The Turschaks hurried home and received another visitor: an Orange County sheriff's deputy.

Campaign signs are vandalized or stolen so often that many people don't report it, and, when they do, law officers often don't investigate.

This time was different.

So he tested the level of the current in front of a reporter, he even posted a warning under the McCain sign that the sign was electrified. And still the thief tried to take them.

Pretty funny.