By Editor,Lauren Acton-Taylor

Copyright dailymail

Masked children have been caught on terrifying surveillance footage playing a Purge-style prank on a family’s home in Alabama, with police warning that the TikTok-inspired stunt could quickly turn deadly.

Door camera footage captured the children running up to a family’s home in Daphne and banging on their front door on Saturday night just after 10pm.

One boy appeared to use his t-shirt to cover his face and the other pulled the hood of his sweater over his head.

The boys then sprinted back into the dark, as the homeowners emerged out of their front door less than a minute later to investigate the noise.

Fellow residents within the Timbercreek neighborhood said the same boys had banged on the windows and doors of several homes on the same night.

Reacting to the incident, Daphne police warned that what may seem like a harmless prank could have incredibly dangerous consequences.

‘If you’re a homeowner and you see this on your your surveillance cameras, then you would only assume the worst, especially at that time of night,’ DPD Captain David Smith said, WKRG reported.

‘What they think is a joke and harmless could really quickly turn tragic,’ Smith told the outlet.

The prank appeared to be part of a social media trend known as the Door Kick Challenge, where teenagers record themselves ringing the doorbell of a home or kicking and hitting doors before running away.

Smith noted similar incidents occurring in Houston not long ago, which took a turn for the worse after a spooked homeowner took up arms.

‘This happened in Houston just a month or two ago where 11-year-olds, small kids, were doing this and the homeowner actually came out and shot one of them,’ Smith added.

‘It turned and went from a harmless prank to something that’s very tragic and we’re trying to keep that from happening here.’

In early September, homeowner Leon Gonzalo Jr., 42, was charged with the murder of 11-year-old Julian Guzman after the boy played ding-dong-ditch with his friends.

At some point during the children’s prank, he came out of his home and started shooting at the children as they ran away.

Guzman was struck in the back and transported to a local hospital with multiple gunshot wounds. He was then pronounced dead the following day.

The boy’s mother Janet Rodriguez hit out at her son’s murderer, saying the young boy ‘didn’t hurt anyone’ and ‘didn’t deserve’ to be killed for playing a game.

‘I can’t believe it. It’s a pain I never imagined I’d feel. He was just a child,’ the grieving mother wrote in heartbreaking tribute.

In Virginia, a 27-year-old homeowner, Tyler Chase Butler, was charged with the murder of 18-year-old Michael Bosworth Jr. in May, after the teen reportedly played the same prank with two friends.

The sheriff’s office said deputies initially responded to reports of a burglary in progress around 3am on Saturday, at the home on McKenzie Lane ‘where a resident had fired shots.’

Butler told detectives the teenagers had been trying to break into his home – but one wounded teenager said they were just recording a TikTok prank video, according to police documents obtained by local media.

The boy who was grazed by a bullet said videos on the teenagers’ phones prove that they were playing a game, not attempting to break in to Butler’s home.

He said they were not familiar with the neighborhood and were attempting to run away when shots were fired.

In 2022, 64-year-old James Moshier was charged with assault and recklessly endangering a child with a deadly weapon after firing a shotgun at a 15-year-old boy at his Long Island home.

A group of teens, including the 15-year-old, had been at a sleepover nearby when they decided to play the same prank.

After knocking on Moshier’s door three times, the homeowner fired his shotgun through the glass, striking the boy in his upper right arm.

The teen initially ran back to his friends, scared and bleeding saying he thought he had been hit with a grenade.

The boy was airlifted to hospital after the incident.

While the boy recovered from the incident, police warned kids to ‘be smart.’

‘Sometimes what we think are harmless pranks turn into major incidents,’ Southold Police Capt. James Ginas said.

In another incident, however, two teenagers were arrested for the prank after they kicked in the door of one homeowner.

Jeffery Merthie, 15, and Zahmarii Reddick, 13, were arrested in DeBary, near Orlando in July after attempting the viral twist on ding dong ditch.

Merthie and Reddick were seen on doorbell footage sneaking up to the house, before slowly turning around with their backs to the door and kicking it several times before running off.

When asked why they did it, Merthie told them they were ‘just being dumb.’

‘We weren’t responsible, we won’t do that no more,’ he said.

Merthie tried to defend their actions, saying they just kicked the door, but the officer quickly pulled up photos of the broken door on his phone to show the teen.

The door had large chunks of splintered wood and the lock and doorknob was entirely busted off.

‘That’s completely broken in,’ he said. ‘You know those people could have shot you?’

Sheriff Mike Chitwood wrote in a statement: ‘Parents, use this as a reminder to TALK with your kids that this challenge is not harmless and is the dumbest way to end up with a felony charge or dead.