In Deltona, Florida, a school library meant for story time and quiet reading turned into the center of a painful lesson in accountability. Investigators say 12-year-old Felix Cohen Romero and 13-year-old Bentley Ryan Wehrly broke into Friendship Elementary’s media center, returning twice in one day as the damage escalated from scattered books to a ransacked, devastated space. When surveillance images went public, it wasn’t anonymous tips that changed everything—it was the boys’ mothers, who reportedly saw their own children on the screen and chose the harder path: they called the sheriff.
The boys now face burglary, trespassing, criminal mischief, and theft charges in the juvenile system, with damage estimated at more than $50,000. Online, outrage over the destruction mixed with praise for the parents who turned them in. Many argued the boys should help rebuild what they destroyed—shelving books, cleaning, restoring the library they shattered—so the consequences aren’t just legal, but deeply personal.