Flint, MI— Days after the deadliest school shooting in a year at Oxford High School in Oxford, Mich., a 17-year-old Flint student has been charged with threatening to shoot up Southwestern Classical Academy.
According to a press release from the Office of Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton, an assistant principal was alerted to the incident and made a report to the Flint police on Dec. 2.
The police investigation revealed that the student had been riding to school that morning on a bus and recorded a video on her phone in a “rap-style” message threating to shoot up the school “like Oxford.” The video was posted on social media.
She was charged as a juvenile with one count of false threat of terrorism and one count of using a computer to commit a crime, each a 20-year felony.
“My message to our community has been loud and clear of the years whenever we have had instances of so-called ‘copycat threats’ following a school shooting or other mass shooting incidents around the country and that message is that it is not a joke, it is a crime and it will be treated as such,” Leyton said in a news release.
Leyton has spent the last few years educating students in Genesee County about the seriousness of threatening to shoot up schools.
“I’m not going to try to figure out whether this incident in Flint today was intended to be a joke or whether it was a credible threat, the bottom line is that it’s a crime,” Leyton said.
Comments are closed.