Teenager Making "Death Threats" Faces Possible Expulsion

[Hairless Kitten II]

anyone got a link to the OP's story?

still can't find anything...

starting to think the story is made up to garner responses.

Maybe one of these:

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Boy_ ... 8-643.html

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/bully/

[Icezealand]

It sounds like bullshit, especially if it's American (or similar) kids where they hear that kind of joking all the time. However, the bad impression could be masking an actual enraged or threatening intonation. Either way, for a younger and whinier teenage kid, I'd say complete expulsion is an overreaction.

[JuNii]

anyone got a link to the OP's story?

still can't find anything...

starting to think the story is made up to garner responses.

Maybe one of these:

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Boy_ ... 8-643.html

*Pulls out Magnifying glass*

Boy Posts Threat, Faces ExpulsionTechtree News Staff, Mar 03, 2006 1713 hrs IST
A student faces possible expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against his classmate on MySpace.com.

In what can be called a fitting rebuke to those who abuse technology, a California-based middle school student faces possible expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against his classmate on the popular MySpace.com Web site. Further, twenty-odd classmates of his have been suspended for viewing the posting.

The boy - whom officials refuse to identify, created a group on MySpace.com wherein he allegedly posted expletive and anti-semitic remarks about a female classmate at the Tewinkle Middle School in Costa Mesa besides threatening to shoot her repeatedly in the head.

The police are investigating the boy's comments about his classmate as a possible hate crime; and the Costa Mesa district is trying to expel him.

Twenty of the boy's classmates - who viewed the boy's site and whose pictures were posted as members of the boy's group of buddies, have already completed two-day suspensions. These students were punished because district officials perceived a real threat to campus security.

The parents of three of the suspended students have said that the invitation to join the boy's MySpace group gave no indication of the alleged threat. They also said that the group's name was "I hate (girl's name)," and included an anti-semitic reference.

A later message directed the group's members to a non-descript folder including a posting which allegedly asked, "Who here in the (group name) wants to take a shotgun, and blast (the girl's name) in the head over a thousand times?"

Officials discovered the threat when a teacher accidentally came across the boy's MySpace.com page. However it's unclear how much the students actually saw, as the creator of a posting can change its content at any time.

Bob Metz, assistant superintendent - secondary education, Newport-Mesa Unified School District, said that with what students can get into using technology, everyone is concerned about it, and that proper action needs to be taken to ensure the kids' safety. Metz requested parents to monitor their children's time online, adding that technology is a wonderful thing as long as it is not abused.

MySpace.com - with over 50 million members, is one of Internet's fastest-growing social networking sites. While the site is commonly used by children, teenagers and adults to create personal profiles, online journals, etc, it apparently has a dark side to it - which is amply demonstrated by this incident.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/bully/

Teen Arrested for Creating Website to Bully Other Teen
By Kim Zetter October 15, 2009 | 3:07 pm | Categories: cyberbullying


A Missouri ninth-grader has been arrested for creating a website that disparaged another teen, the most recent arrest in a series of crackdowns by Missouri authorities on so-called cyberbullying.

School district authorities in Troy, Missouri, where the female student attends the Troy Buchanan Ninth Grade Center (pictured at right), alerted the sheriff last Thursday after the female target of the site told the principal about it, a sheriff’s spokesman told Threat Level.

“The website had very troublesome things posted on it by an individual who obviously had a dislike for the other female in the school,” said Lt. Andy Binder, a Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department spokesman.

The name of the website, which has since been taken down, included the target’s name and “cunt.com,” Binder told Threat Level, and it hosted photos of the target. A couple of posts on the site, which were written anonymously, referred to the target as a “slut” and disparaged her for the male company she kept. The author of the posts also indicated that the target “would be better off if she just died” instead of hanging out with so many boys, Binder said.

“The perpetrator did wish for her death and was very unhappy with her,” Binder said.

He noted that Missouri schools developed a zero-tolerance policy with regard to bullying in the wake of the Lori Drew case, in which a middle-aged mother in Missouri was involved in creating a MySpace account that was used to bully a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meier. The teen committed suicide after someone using the MySpace account told Meier that the world would be better off without her.

“The schools in the area are not willing to take the chance of losing another student,” Binder said.


Binder said authorities determined the identity of the perpetrator after contacting other people whose names appeared on the site. The ninth-grader then confessed to creating the page and was remanded to a juvenile detention center.

The case has been turned over to juvenile court prosecutors who will determine if the teen will be charged with a crime. In the meantime, the school district has disciplined the perpetrator, though federal privacy laws bar school authorities from disclosing the nature of that discipline, according to a spokeswoman.

“All I can tell you is that our policy for [punishing] any type of bullying, including cyberbullying, includes anything from lost privileges all the way up to expulsions,” said April Huddleston, a spokeswoman for Lincoln County R-III School District.

She said the school got law enforcement involved because officials felt some of the statements made on the site were “alarming.”

“We decided it was a case that was severe enough that we needed to get law enforcement involved and let them make an independent judgment [about the harassment],” she said.

She noted that the school is gearing up for an anti-bullying awareness week at the end of October that was planned before this incident came to light and is designed to encourage students to treat their peers with respect and be accountable for their words and actions. Oct. 27 is “Sock It to Bullying Day” at the school where students are encouraged to wear crazy socks.

Missouri passed a law last year criminalizing cyber-harassment in the wake of the Megan Meier case. That harassment occurred in 2006, but local authorities were unable to charge Lori Drew with a crime because state and federal statutes at the time didn’t address cyber-harassment.

In the absence of a federal law prohibiting cyberbullying, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles opted to charge Drew under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking statute, for violating MySpace’s terms of service in helping to create the account and participating in the harassment. MySpace is based in Los Angeles County.

Drew was charged with three felonies but was ultimately convicted on two lesser misdemeanor counts. The jury could not reach agreement on the third felony charge. The two misdemeanor convictions, however, were recently overturned by the judge in the case, who found that the CFAA was “constitutionally vague.” The judge was troubled that the convictions, if allowed to stand, would open the door for prosecutors to criminalize a violation of any website’s terms of service.

Last year, Missouri legislators updated a state statute against harassment, which outlaws threats or harassing communication that causes emotional distress, by broadening it to include digital communications sent via the computer or text messaging. Under the law, perpetrators can be charged with a misdemeanor or felony.

The law went into effect August 2008, and by December, Missouri prosecutors had filed a flurry of charges against seven people accused of violating the statute.

* A 21-year-old woman was charged for allegedly sending harassing text messages to a 16-year-old girl and allowing others to use her cellphone to leave vulgar voicemail messages for the victim threatening her with rape, among other things. The perpetrator allegedly targeted the teen over a jealous dispute involving a boy.

* Two St. Louis men were charged separately with sending harassing text messages to their ex-girlfriends.

* A man protesting the development of a proposed resort was charged with sending a threatening e-mail to city hall staff.

* A 28-year-old woman was accused of sending harassing text messages to her ex-husband’s girlfriend.

* A 19-year-old man was charged with sending some 17 text messages to his mother’s husband.

* A 17-year-old involved with a classmate in a dispute over a girl is accused of sending the classmate death threats via text messages.

Teenager Making "Death Threats" Faces Possible Expulsion
by Meldaria » Thu Nov 05, 2009 3:28 pm

A 13 year old was accused of threatening to kill two students at a middle school. They filed their witness reports and the young boy faces possible expulsion. According to the 13 year old being accused he was only making a joke. He said it was in this context. "Hey man move the desk over there." Witness 1. "Man I will keeel you.." The second incident is seperate from the first and he claims he barely remembers it and is sure he was joking. He said he was only quoting a movie and meant no threat and that he was just fooling around and meant no harm whatsoever. The school seems to be taking this very seriously. Is this bullshit?

the details are different. so i don't think so.

[Cubic kms]

The adults of today are taking the fun out of school

I want to see fire and stuff in science... not boil cabbage

[TURGOV]

we make worse threats all the time at my high school, like the really popular saying amongst us freshman, "I WILL GOUGE OUT YOUR EYES AND SKULL FUCK YOU!" (full metal jacket quote) teachers have heard this, and even said it, and everyone makes random threats of violence to everyone else, so i guess my school either doesnt give a rats ass if we all kill each other or we have some kind of Facist faculty that thinks it will weed out the weak, either way not all american schools are that intense over threats of violence.

[Tezdrian]

So doing a lousy Achmed the Dead Terrorist impression is grounds for expulsion?

And they say Zero Tolerance is too harsh...

^THIS^

[Barzan]

So doing a lousy Achmed the Dead Terrorist impression is grounds for expulsion?

And they say Zero Tolerance is too harsh...

^THIS^

Zero tolerance makes zero sense. It's a knee-jerk reaction from people who are too stupid or too lazy to bother finding causes to and solutions for problems.