Coronavirus: New York man locks son out of house after he parties with friends in Texas during spring break
ROCKLAND, NEW YORK: The coronavirus pandemic has obviously led to global panic. And that panic has led to some pretty weird situations. One of those situations is that of a father who is now refusing to let his son come home.
Matt Levine, 21, from Nanuet, New York, traveled to South Padre Island, Texas, for spring break with his friends from Massachusetts' Springfield College in mid-March. Even as the scare of the pandemic was at an all-time high, Matt refused to cut his spring break trip short. In fact, instead of returning home, Matt sent photos of him in busy outdoor situations like music concerts to his family. Naturally, his father wasn’t pleased.
“I spoke with him every day and told him that maybe they should come home,” 52-year-old Peter Levine, Matt’s father, told the New York Post. “I was aggravated. The news here was getting worse and worse... It’s the scene you would not want to be in.”
In all fairness, Matt wasn’t the only one. Because early and mid-March, a lot of places were not under lockdown. In fact, guidelines against spring break had not been announced. Yes, local businesses were told to stock hand sanitizers, but nothing was concrete. It’s also prudent to remember that Matt’s decision to party despite the pandemic was echoed by many across the country, including one unfortunate student named Brady Sluder, who justified himself on camera, saying, “If I get corona, I get corona, at the end of the day I’m not gonna let it stop me from partying.”
Sluder has since publicly apologized, and Matt has had to pay in his own way. Peter reportedly told Matt that he and his friends would not be able to stay at their Nanuet home on their way back to college, supposedly part of their original plan. Peter’s logic was that Matt’s grandparents also resided with them and that there was “no need to expose them to god knows what he had been exposed to!”
Of course, Matt’s spring break was far from ideal. “We were only allowed to go to the beach in small groups and couldn’t have speakers; by then, there was basically no one on the island,” Matt told the New York Post. “The police seemed like they were trying to ruin our good time.”
His bad luck streak only began there. Matt’s airplane was rerouted to Tennessee because there had been a confirmed coronavirus diagnosis at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. “The passengers were freaking out and trying to stay away from each other. But we made it home,” Matt said.
And even when he had landed, he was only to meet some harsh rejection from his family. Peter outright refused to pick up Matt and his friends from the airport, leaving them to find a car service to drive them to the family home. And once there, Peter told them they couldn't go inside the home. “I said, ‘Stay right there! Do not go any further!’” Peter said, adding that he did not even let them inside to use the bathroom. The kids had to use the bushes to relieve themselves.
“I love my son, but they were not sleeping here,” Peter said, as Matt and his friends had to go on a two-and-a-half-hour drive back to their college town. Peter might come off as a cold and unkind father in this story, but he certainly isn’t. He had reportedly filled his son's car trunk with groceries and put $300 in cash in an envelope on the front seat.
But even at his off-campus apartment that he shares with roommates in Massachusetts, Matt has nothing to look forward to right now. College classes have been canceled in light of the pandemic.