Wild car meetups claimed a life in Delaware. The crackdown is coming, but on whom?

The scene at Riveredge Industrial Park was pandemonium, Delaware State troopers said.

It was Labor Day weekend in New Castle — just a week after the parking lot of nearby Pike Creek Shopping Center had “popped off” with 300 to 500 cars burning rubber into smoke and turning donuts in the parking lot, according to Delaware State Police Captain Jeremiah Lloyd.

Pike Creek spectators had mocked and kicked at the tires of responding police cruisers, he said, and drivers later caused an accident down the road as they fled.

Delaware State Police say these so-called car “takeovers” or “slidefests” have become a scourge fueled by social media: automotive flash-mobs planned in secret and manifested via texts and direct messages.

In videos captured across the internet, young drivers rev and drift their cars across parking lots, causing noise and property damage and sometimes leading to injuries or deaths.

On Aug. 20, a teenager lost his life and another man was wounded in a still-unsolved shooting during a car gathering in a New Castle warehouse.

But on Labor Day weekend, the Delaware State Police were ready.

They’d gotten a tip about a clandestine event on Sept. 2 called “302 Waterslide,” Lloyd said, where tens or perhaps hundreds planned to drift their cars around on pavement slicked with water balloons. Undercover officers tracked cars to an expansive tract of parking lots by the Delaware River.

Police drones filmed from above as cars careened or burned out on the blacktop. Cruisers then pulled up to the industrial park to block the exits, Lloyd told a crowd of law enforcement and concerned citizens at a public meeting in Wilmington on Sept. 19.

“Nearly 100 cars tried to get out at one time,” he told the gathered crowd. “We had the ingresses and egresses plugged up, so they took to the grass and the railroad tracks. They drove everywhere besides on the road. Thirty uniformed cops just wasn’t enough.”

Police managed to write a few citations and impounded five cars, said DSP spokesperson Amina Ali. They arrested a few people on outstanding warrants. One livid New Jersey mother turned in her own teenager, after she traced her car to a police impound lot, Lloyd said.

But most at Riveredge got away.

Lloyd had arrived at the public safety town hall, hosted by Republican Delaware House representatives Mike Ramone and Mike Smith, to lay out the problems caused by unsanctioned car meets.

But Lloyd also called for action: Stricter laws. More flexibility to arrest and prosecute. Higher consequences for offenders.

Car meets: Squealing tires, loud engines: Pike Creek residents angered by unsanctioned car meet

Fatal accident: 17-year-old killed, 21-year-old shot during unsanctioned car meet in New Castle Sunday

Solutions to car takeovers have been elusive for Delaware lawmakers and police

Police and lawmakers had convened a similar town hall two years ago, Ramone said. The results in 2022 were included new bipartisan laws governing spinning tires and drag racing.

Those laws granted authority in Delaware to suspend licenses and temporarily impound the vehicle of anyone convicted of drag racing or doing donuts in a parking lot. They opened up off-road vehicles to prosecutions for violating traffic laws.

Ramone, who is Delaware House minority leader, said he doesn’t want Delaware to see the continual problems with racing and car takeovers faced in Philadelphia, problems he said he witnessed firsthand. Ramone said this spring, he and other attendees of a Shen Yun Chinese dance performance were swarmed on Broad Street by ATVs.

“A couple of people were driving three-wheeled motorcycles and some were on dirt bikes,” he said, “literally driving up the sidewalk in Philadelphia.”

Results from the last round of laws have been mixed. Most cited for "trespass by motor vehicle" have pled guilty. But among 46 people cited by Delaware State Police for an updated “speed exhibitions” law designed to punish “Fast and Furious”-style street racing and drifting, only three have led to convictions. The majority, 29 cases, weren't prosecuted, while others are pending.

“We’re working to close that gap,” Lloyd said.

As unsanctioned car meets in Delaware continue, and drivers continue to scatter and evade police, Lloyd proposed that lawmakers also grant the authority to prosecute the spectators whose attention fuels the illegal car drifting events.

Unintentional bystanders — people who just walked out of a shopping mall, say — would not be prosecuted, Lloyd promised.

Don't call it a takeover: Not all car meets are created equal, say Delaware car enthusiasts

Talk about crackdowns is exactly what worries Jake Voshell.

For the past two years he and a couple other organizers have been holding weekly car meets in the parking lot of Pit Daddy’s BBQ in Smryna — meets he’s pretty sure police might call “unsanctioned.”

Hundreds showed up on a Thursday in late August. Attendees included a canary-yellow hot rod that looked like it drove itself right out of the pages of vintage "Cracked" magazine, multiple proud parents of new Dodge Chargers, and a modified ‘92 Eagle Talon with 500 horses under the hood.

None revved their engines, burned tires or blasted radios. None skidded in the grass or gravel. Voshell won’t let them, said co-organizer Joe Deladvitch, who said they have to run a tight ship to avoid attention and be respectful of their hosts at Pit Daddy’s.

Delaware is one of the best states for car culture, Voshell said, full of racetracks and car clubs. Indeed, a 2023 study by Chrysler Capital named the First State tops in the country for car enthusiasts. That’s something to be treasured, Voshell said.

Voshell, an Air Force reservist, has no love for people who drift their storebought cars in parking lot takeovers and risk the lives of bystanders. He calls it “mob behavior” driven by TikTok and YouTube videos.

“The takeover stuff is just a cancer,” Voshell said. Those cars spinning their tires in YouTube videos have nothing to do with real car culture, he said.

“Most of those cars are stock,” Voshell said. He spit out the word like a curse, describing the dealer-spec cars he sees in the videos. People who care about their cars, who spent all their money and time building them into something to be proud of, don’t slide them in a parking lot until they crash, he said.

“Takeovers are for children that got their mom's minivan for today, and they don't know what to do with themselves,” Voshell said.

Most at Pit Daddy’s had the same sentiments about takeovers, at least when queried by a reporter.

“My street racing days are long behind me,” laughed mechanical engineer Donell Booker of Newark, the proud owner — and builder— of that 500-horsepower Talon.

He races on tracks, he said, as did multiple attendees we talked to.

“That’s the hump we have to get over,” Booker said. “People think everyone with a modded car is a street racer.”

Delaware car enthusiasts face consequences after recent car takeover events

Coverage of takeovers and slideshows on the evening news in recent years, and talk of tougher laws, has meant increasing scrutiny for car enthusiasts in Delaware, said car meet attendees.

Voshell said in recent years his car meet was forced to move from place to place. A previous meet, held in a mostly abandoned Dover parking lot, ended when a Dollar Tree location opened and management told them to leave, Voshell said.

Their meet moved to a mostly empty mini-mall down the road. A property manager promptly kicked them out there, too, he said.

“The only difference between sanctioned and unsanctioned events is money,” Voshell said. He fears that corporations and chains have taken over so much of Delaware’s public space that car meets will become restricted to sponsored events that cost money.

Finally, Pit Daddy’s owner Charles "CJ" Dickerson allowed Voshell's car meet on his property — an arrangement that’s mostly worked out for both parties, Dickerson said. He keeps his barbecue restaurant open later hours on Thursdays, selling tender pork and brisket sandwiches out of a takeout window.

Car meet attendee Isaiah Fillyau, a former Cape Henlopen football standout who now races cars on local tracks, said he about 10 friends used to meet at parking lots from Milford to Rehoboth Beach.

But more recently police have made this impossible, he said.

“Generally car meets are just people walking around and looking at cars,” Fillyau said. “But we stopped throwing them because it got to where cops were coming as soon as we pulled up. It was bad. We’d leave, try to find another spot, and then it would happen again.”

Lawmakers and police seek solutions, but agree 'car meet-ups aren't the problem.'

Lawmakers and state police say they’re not trying to come down on car lovers like Voshell or Fillyau, but rather find tools to crack down on bad actors.

Rep. Ramone said he’s greatly enjoyed Cruise Nights in his district, where gearheads and collectors showed off modified cars. He’s also perfectly happy to see cars racing or drifting on safe, legal racetracks.

What concerns him, he said, are videos he’s viewed in which tens of cars skid around a parking lot, while pedestrians block police cruisers with their bodies to stop them from acting.

“It’s not the hobby that we’re concerned with,” Ramone said. “This is almost more like social unrest… dressed up to look entertaining on YouTube.”

Police spokespeople say much the same.

“Essentially, car meet-ups aren’t the problem,” wrote DSP spokesperson Ali. The problem is the “pattern of increasingly violent and disorderly behavior” that police have recently seen at these meet-ups, Ali wrote.

Police may be called upon to monitor car meets, Ali said. And often, attendees scatter at the first sight of a police cruiser.

“It then becomes like leap frog from one shopping center to the next for several hours throughout the state,” Ali wrote. “The sheer volume of attendees compared to troopers makes it very difficult to conduct enforcement on these gatherings. Usually, as soon as police are seen, the attendees rapidly flee with no regard for safety. It’s resulted in crashes and pursuits.”

Ramone expects continued meetings between police, the attorney general and lawmakers of both parties to find solutions to disruptive car meets. One solution is to make Delaware less hospitable than neighboring states for people who want to make trouble with cars, Ramone said.

In part, he said, that may mean enhancing penalties or granting more flexibility to law enforcement to create an environment “where police are respected again” rather than taunted and evaded.

Voshell, the car meet organizer, is sympathetic to those worried about disruptive car takeovers and slide shows.

"I feel bad for the people that are just normal people sitting in their houses, and that's what they have to hear at two o'clock in the morning," he said. "I'd be furious."

But that has nothing to do with the car meets and drag races his family has been attending for three generations, he said. And he wonders why police would need to show up to car meets that aren't disruptive. When lawmakers make new laws, he hopes they take care not to damage Delaware’s passionate car culture.

“You have a lot of people who aren’t part of official car clubs that would just like to get together with like minds,” Voshell said. “How long is it going to be before Delaware State Police, New Castle, Dover, whoever — until they start saying, ‘Nope, you're just not allowed to do that anymore?’”

Matthew Korfhage is a USA Today Network reporter in the broader Philadelphia region, covering culture, food, equity, science and why the trains don't run on time. Email him at mkorfhage@gannett.com or follow him on the site formerly known as Twitter @matthewkorfhage.

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Wild Delaware car meets, police crackdowns, car lovers caught between