Written by Michal Sandersoninski, Staff Writer.

Peoria, IL–A local pool party in Peoria went horribly wrong Sunday when a group of friends got into a roughhousing incident that apparently “went too far.” Jake Jones, a 2015 Peoria High School graduate was home visiting with former high school classmates, all home upon the completion of their spring semester at their respective colleges.

“We were all really excited to get home and see each other… catch up on how we’ve all been doing in college, and just chillax like old times,” Jones told reporters for the Peoria Journal Star after the incident took place. Jones gave more context, revealing that his parents had recently opened the family’s in-ground, heated pool, and the “guys and I were just really stoked to get back to our usual goofing around.”

Jake, whose friends Riley Hendrickson, Greg Vitale, and Peter Harris were accustomed to using Jake’s family’s pool, confessed it was not uncommon for their pool festivities to devolve into a “somewhat primitive, caveman-like display of manliness,” often resulting in a fight, a battle of vigor and hilarity often aided with the swift swinging around of pool noodles to invoke a “Highlander vibe.” Jake confirmed that the group were diehard Highlander fans, a dramatic TV show and film about Scottish swordsmen, making their Highlander-themed pool brawls only natural. He said that it wasn’t uncommon, either, for one of the young men to sing the Highlander theme before pool noodles were drawn from their imaginary sheaths.

It was Sunday afternoon, however, that a wholesome game of pool noodle sword fighting reminiscent of earlier times went “way too far,” Jones claimed. “They were ganging up on me,” the young soon-to-be college sophomore said. “Riley, Greg, and Peter had me cornered, and we were battling like any other time. But then Riley kept hitting me. I said he was hitting too hard, but he wouldn’t stop… and then Greg and Peter joined in, like howling hyenas giggling as their pool noodles slapped my face like a tornado that wouldn’t stop.”

By the time the trio finally let the poor young man free from beating, his face had fresh bruises and was even bloodied in some places–on the forehead, under the nose, on the left cheek. The pool noodles apparently broke skin as their unrelenting, vigorous whacking took its first victim. Passers-by apparently watched in horror as the shocking display petrified them to inactivity in their respective spaces. However, when the battle  concluded, Riley apparently demanded “someone call the cops. I’m pressing charges!”

Jones, who was apparently traumatized by previous pool noodle battles, claimed that his friends’ “battering” of him had never been so “severe,” admitting that his pressing charges might “seem uncool,” but that they “have to learn.”

“Jake really knows how to ruin a good time,” Riley Hendrickson told reporters from the Peoria Journal Star in response to Jones’s decision to press charges. He noted that “Jake was always a goodie two shoe,” recalling a time that the young man foiled their plan to steal a sign from a local Steak ‘n Shake parking lot by entering the restaurant and telling the manager. “I had to tell him,” Jones argued. “They were breaking the law!” Hendrickson, who will never “let Jake live that one down,” reportedly admitted “me and the boys might have been a little rough on him this time. I don’t know what got into us. Maybe it was blind rage, pent up-aggression, repressed anger that just got out.” The trio was charged with three counts of battery and improper use of a pool noodle.

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Michal Sandersoninski is a self-described “radical leftist” who enjoys making his friends cry while playing the board game Risk “without showing any mercy!” Despite his apparent depraved motivation to “rule the world,” he remains a pretty chill guy, a good friend, a man of great intellect who is informed by his admirable good values.