Activity on a teenager’s Instagram account prompted an investigation in Fresno, California, this week that briefly shut down two local high schools and has left the 15-year-old facing felony charges.
Authorities were alerted Monday to a social media post made by an unnamed San Joaquin Memorial High sophomore that evoked the 1999 Columbine school massacre in which a teacher and 13 students were shot and killed by two classmates in Littleton, Colorado.
“I take seven kids from Columbine, stand ’em all in a line, add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine, a MAC-11 and it oughtta solve the problem of mine. And that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time. I’m just like Shady and just as crazy as the world was over this whole Y2K thing,” the teen allegedly wrote Monday afternoon.
Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer told reporters that detectives had “every reason to believe that there was potential for a threat to be carried out” and went to the student’s house on Monday where a search was conducted upon his father’s consent.
A long gun was located in the living room of the home “in plain sight,” and police returned with a warrant later that evening and recovered several other firearms, ammunition and a bulletproof vest, the Los Angeles Times reported.
San Joaquin Memorial and another area school the teen had previously attended were both closed Tuesday as a precaution, district officials told the Times.
The student and his father denied ownership of the gun, and the teen said he didn’t author the Instagram post either, the Times reported. Police are conducting a forensics investigation of his iPhone and and iPad for any evidence.
So far, the student’s claims are at least partly correct. The supposed trigger-happy posting wasn’t purely the work of the teen, but rather lyrics from two songs by Grammy-winning rapper Eminem, “Rap God” and “I’m Back.” The only difference is that the Instagram post read “I’m just like Shady,” not “I’m Shady” — a reference to the artist’s moniker, Slim Shady.
Authorities said that a conversation that unfolded in the comments of the post was enough cause for concern. “Bring me with man. I got some stuff [to] settle,” another teen allegedly wrote, to which police say the sophomore replied “Ill text you when,” and, “I got a couple idiots’ blocks I could knock off.”
Chief Dyer described the suspect as “socially awkward” and a “loner” during a press conference Tuesday.
“These are really all of the things we look for in individuals that historically have been involved in incidents like Columbine,” he said. “So we’re very fortunate that this was brought to our attention.”
Authorities have charged the boy with disrupting school activity and making terrorist threats, a felony. A family lawyer told Billboard that the boy says his Instagram account was hacked.
In 2013, a teenager in Texas was arrested and charged with making terrorist threats for a Facebook posting he said was done in jest. The teen’s lawyer claimed their client joked, “I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,” during an online argument over a computer game.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.