Chicago Sun-Times – April 27, 2007:
Police Thursday released portions of an essay used to charge a Cary-Grove High School student with disorderly conduct, leaving several experts puzzled at an arrest based on such schoolwork.
Asked to write about whatever he wanted in a creative writing class, would-be Marine and honors student Allen Lee, 18, described a violent dream in which he shot people and then “had sex with the dead bodies.”
But then he immediately dismissed the idea as a mere joke, writing, “not really, but it would be funny if I did.”
A second disorderly count accuses Lee of alarming first-year teacher Nora Capron by writing that “as a teacher, don’t be surprised on [sic] inspiring the first CG shooting,” an apparent reference to Cary-Grove High.
Here’s the essay:
Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, S…t…a…b…, poke. “So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone…, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.” Umm, yeah, what to wright about…… I’m leaving to join the Marines and I really don’t give a (obscenity) about my academics, so why does the only class that’s complete Bull Shit, happen to be the only required class…enough said. The model citizen would stay around to vote in new board member to change the 4 years of English policy, but no one really stays around to vote for that kind of local crap, so whoever gets there name on the Ballet with a pretty face gets to do what the (obscenity) ever they want with local ordinance. A person is smart, but people are dumb selfish animals. We can’t make rules for ourselves so we vote others to do it for us, but we can’t even do that right, I meen seriously, Bush for President? And our other option was John Kerry who claimed to parktake in Vietnam Special Forces missions that haven’t been declassified….(obscenity) Bull Shit. So Power Flower Super Mario. Pudge, hook, rot, dismember “Fresh Meat.” Mostly new/young teachers are laid back, and cooperative with students as feedback and input into the curriculum and atmosphere. My current English teacher is a control freak intent on setting a gap between herself and her students like a 63 year old white male fortune 500 company CEO, and a illegal immigrant. If CG was a private catholic school, I could understand, but wtf is her problem. And baking brownies and rice crispies does not make up for it, way to try and justify yourself as a good teacher while underhandedly looking for complements on your cooking. No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don’t be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting.
32. Yes, the timing of this is key. This lad needs some help fast.
#28, Frank.
You have a good point there. Uuhh, I mean, he has a good point there,, oopps, I mean, …
phuk it. You get the point.
“I await your tiresome, overly long, boring, irrelevant, intoxicant influenced, babbling tirade. ”
He he.
“Yup, there goes another couple of teacher’s salaries to defend something before the courts that should never have gotten this far. To mitigate the circumstances, the School Board should immediately apologize and reinstate him.”
No one needs to be fired or sued, the teacher did the right thing. Any teacher would and should be a little skittish after the recent events. But this boy knew damn good and well what he was doing. Common sense would come down on the side of caution, not hysteria.
I’d be right there with all you guys defending this kid on this… It was dumb, poorly written, reflected poorly upon the writer, bla bla bla, but at worst all he needs is some counseling and bla bla bla…
But for that last sentence…
Schools need to take death threats seriously, and that’s what that looks like, even if it isn’t actually what it is. And I still don’t know that it isn’t what it looks like.
Now tossing him out of school and putting him in jail and whatever else was probably overboard… But this kid fucked up pretty hard and needs to be taken to task for what he did. Take off the last sentence and you have a stupid kid. Add it, you may very well have a credible threat.
And you’d all dance to a different beat if nothing was done and he actually did kill some people, and you damn well know it.
I realize looking back what I wrote in number 11… which was snarky… but I had just read the sample once… When I revisited it later, that when that threat leapt out to me and I changed my tune.
Just think about that line and your reaction if it were written about you.
Although I do still think it was, as it seems things always are, handled sloppily. But this ain’t the kid who called to check on a school closing and got accused falsely of a bomb threat… This is the kid who appears to have actually made a real threat.
Given that there was just a mass murder at a school, I don’t think it was in his best interest to write how funny it would be to kill a bunch of students and have sex with their bodies. If he wants attention he got it. If this was a joke, then he does have some mental problems because what mind thinks that’s funny. When writers write about murders and torture its supposed to be scary, not humorous. There’s something wrong with this kid.
I vote we jail that Stephen King guy before he blows somebody up. Have you seen the crap he writes?
You all suck and I will kill you
For a hamburger on tuesday
Am I crazy yet?
This is baloney. The kid was told to write whatever he wanted and not to censor himself. Before making a snap judgement, read the rest of the article in the newspaper. I can only imagine how many times Stephen King would have been arrested if this is going to be where we set the bar.
Good thing Quentin Tarantino and Chuck Palahniuk have already graduated high school.
#32
Lauren the Ghoti
i should have added that we had a marine station near where i was stationed at and we trained with them a lot.
sorry
🙂
When did free speech mean there are no connsequences for that speech? and why does everyone assume the kid is guilty because he was arrested? Oh that’s right we don’t believe the system will work right so if your arrestted you are automatically guilty of something, tried then executed. I menat ome on the guy is talking about a school shooting right after the worst one in our history. Teachers etc have to do something about it and that doesn’t mean he is going to jail.
Send him to Iraq.
#40 – jumbojs
“Given that there was just a mass murder at a school, I don’t think it was in his best interest to write how funny it would be to kill a bunch of students and have sex with their bodies.”
Amen. Pretty friggin’ idiotic for a ‘straight-A’ student to not figure that out… which, in turn leads to…
“If he wants attention he got it.”
Could be this was the only way he could “ask” for intervention without actually asking for it, and thereby losing face, a major issue for types who obsess about “toughness” and living up to exaggerated masculine stereotypes – like our wannabe Marine here.
“If this was a joke, then he does have some mental problems because what mind thinks that’s funny. … There’s something wrong with this kid.”
Lemme hear ya say a-men!
• • • • •
#35 – Fusion me lad;
I’m beginning to realize that you’re not brainwashed, just naïve. This was a good clue, for me, that you are one of these innocent souls who wants to believe that people mean what they say and are too innocent to understand that baldfaced lying is not only common public behavior, but is, particularly in the case of criminal defense attorneys, a de facto job requirement. No wonder you think Orenthal isn’t a murderer – all those well-dressed, well-spoken, educated men defending him just couldn’t be lying, now could they?
I say all that to point out that you – I realize now, without intention to deceive – just made a thoroughly deceitful defense of this clown’s actions, the exact sort of technicality that lawyers use every day to try to help the guilty escape punishment. Let’s look at it:
“Question the whole arrest thing too, especially if he only did what his teacher instructed him to do.”
See, this is a semantic ruse. You’ve obviously fallen for it yourself, not realizing that it says one thing but implies something else.
“He only did…” WHAT did he do, exactly? He, immediately after a shooting massacre of historic proportions, at a school, suggests, in a
the same setting – a school – committing a shooting massacre. When you use the qualifier “only”, that is to slyly distract from this fact. Only an utter moron or a psychotic would even consider suggesting such a thing at such a time, in such a tragic atmosphere.
No sane, even remotely intelligent person would show such a pathological, inhuman, cold-blooded indifference to such a horrid event, let alone suggest that he would commit the same, exact, monumentally horrible crime against humanity. P E R I O D.
Get this straight: what his teacher instructed him to do, and what you FALSELY IMPLY that his teacher instructed him to do are two completely different things.
When his teacher – or anyone’s teacher, anywhere, at any time – says, “Write whatever you want,” every single sane, intelligent person understands completely well that the normal, societally acceptable bounds of morality are still in place, that 18-year–old English-speaking individuals are rightfully assumed to possess common sense and will not have to have it spelled out explicitly to them that “whatever you want” OBVIOUSLY means “whatever you want, within the bounds of social acceptability, legality and sanity.”
So, sorry, Fusion, but his teacher did absolutely NOT say, “Write absolutely anything under the sun, no matter how socially unacceptable,” and was not expected to do so, since it is already understood by all parties at all times for their words and behavior to stay within that boundary, always and everywhere. And either [a] he knew that and wanted the attention, for whatever motive, which proves him beyond doubt to be of subnormal intelligence – or [b], he was oblivious to that constraint, which is a powerful indication of psychopathic ideation. Since [a] is negated as a possibility by his scholastic record, we are left only with [b], that he is quite possibly a highly dangerous psychopath – a conclusion that would be utterly criminally irresponsible to not act upon.
Grow up, Fusion. The carefully crafted, technically correct and morally 100% incorrect excuses devised by professional deceivers to make money by helping the guilty get away with their wrongful acts don’t have a God-damn thing to do with the truth. I realize you mean well, but you’re a defense attorney’s dream juror, the perfect sucker, taking a contrived, twisted artificial interpretation of the letter of the law over the real-world meaning, spirit and factual intent of the law…
You’re a bright guy, but you’re also a babe-in-the-woods. You obviously know very little about truth and the tools used to determine it – and the people whose business it is to distort and hide it. You should try to pick up at least the fundaments of logic, semantics and probability. A little grounding in abnormal psych would be a great help, too.
#49 – Dude, he’s a highskool kid, cut him some slack
This is a sad day.
How you couch potato citizens allow the government whittle away your constitutional rights. Instead of responding in a knee-jerk emotional way with the masses, react with calm reason.
Should someone consult with this kid? Yes.
Should he be arrested or treated as if he were a criminal for excercising the most basic of freedoms of all citizens of this country? NO!
It’s ridiculous, plain and simple. Obviously we all want to be able to identify potentially dangerous people in society, but to focus in on one aspect of an individual’s personality as being “the key” to figuring it out is insane. How about we just euthanize all of these people based on this warning? Does anyone really think ten years down the line we’ll have eradicated the problem? Friggin’ nuts. There are so many things that play into the mentality of the mass murderer and I doubt we have identified even 10% of those. Even if we did think we knew what to look for, does anyone honestly believe that all of these people are exactly alike in their thinking and drive to commit such horrible acts?
I have quite a vested interest in these developments. For one, I have two kids who will always be at risk of this happening. Heck, I am a target myself in my workplace, it is not isolated to just kids.
More personally, I wrote many a disturbing story in my high school years. For my creative writing class final project I put together a magazine called Asylum. It was full of my stories and fake ads and such that would ring a dozen alarms if any teacher saw it today. For my final presentation I stood in front of a class of 30 students and one quite nice elderly teacher and read a story written in the first person about killing my pregnant wife and eating the fetus. The reaction was a mixture of disgust, amusement, and some genuine shock. I got an A in that class and my teacher asked if she could keep the magazine. And no, she did not want to keep it to show my counselor or the authorities, she wanted to keep it as a sample for future classes she thought it was so creative and well written.
If my kids tried such a thing when they are of that age they’ll probably evacuate the school and call the FBI.
#45 – Quentin Tarantino didn’t graduate from high school. He quit when he was 16.
#51 – Actually, it isn’t a particularly sad day, and if you knew the law and knew the Constitution, you’d know that. This is not a free speech issue in the least.
You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater and you can’t threaten to kill people.
54. “Quentin Tarantino didn’t graduate from high school. He quit when he was 16.”
Well, that certainly explains a lot!
#27- No, it isn’t pointless. He sucks. I hack up better prose the morning after a bender.
can you provide some samples ??
#32 the usmc wants professional killers, not amateurs.
#38 why shouldn’t the teacher bear any responsibility ??
52.”If my kids tried such a thing when they are of that age they’ll probably evacuate the school and call the FBI.”
I’ve called them, they’re on the way.
So, we are profiling Korean dorks.
#50 – Dude, he’s a highskool kid, cut him some slack
So were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
Now Now, just kiss and make up. Stop the hurt!
#65, That depends, do you have a bristly mustache?
This is a pure shame, CHO I didnt want to think was a manchurian Canadate to sorts, but this is event more violation of freedom..Thought crimes.. IF this shit were to be going on twenty years ago, David Lynch would be being sodimized by Q.Tarintino while Jon Waters beats his meat to the little guy off of the youtube videos dancing in Bollywood while R,Gere gets arrested.. Not to mention that basketball diary guy, he would be sharing a cell with Sharon Stone wickedly whipping out the lesbonic ax to pick apart the scrotrum of society..
Fusewad, you’ve already passed ‘lame’ way back, you’ve reached ‘truly pathetic’.
It takes a special sort of lint-brained bozo to continually fail to grasp what I, Jerk-Face, OFTLO, mark, Jägermeister, et alia have said, in our own ways.
That teacher was not “inexperienced,” except in your little fantasy world. She offered the same goddam assignment in the same way as countless tens of thousands of teachers have over X-knows-how-many decades – or centuries, more likely – to millions of students. There was no “loaded question,” you crosseyed dipshit. No fucking “rules changed.” What feeble crock of puke are you trying to feed us?
Anyone over the age of 6 who is not mentally retarded or psychotic knows without any doubt whatsoever that when any authority figure says “write / say / do anything you want to,” it always means WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IS SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE, WHICH ARE KNOWN TO ALL.
Do you grasp that, you glue-sniffing, limp-dick imbecile? NO ONE BUT A MENTAL DEFECTIVE WOULD ASSUME DIFFERENTLY.
THE LINE THAT EVERYONE KNOWS NOT TO CROSS – HE CROSSED IT – NOT THE TEACHER.
HE IS THE WRONGDOER. THE TEACHER IS NOT.
Any of the foregoing make it through your 3″+ of ossified cranium?
“But no one told me not to” is the sociopath’s classic knowingly deceptive rationalization for deliberately violating social norms. It is never valid or legitimate. And your continual assertion that it is doesn’t make it so, you blithering asswipe dork.
And BTW, who the fuck fed you the laughably idiotic idea that a threat has to be ‘direct’? Go learn something factual (for a change) about how ‘threat’ is defined under law, and while you’re at it, ‘intent.’ Then, come back and STFU. And go shove your ‘blame the victim’ shit up your ass too. Sideways.
With your inbred absence of any moral awareness and uncanny knack for cheering-on the wrong team, you really should’ve been a fuckin’ criminal defense lawyer. Seems like every time you open your PC piehole, it’s to spew another feeble excuse for some sorry fuckup, always absolving the mental / moral defective in question of all responsibility for brainless and / or evil deeds they themselves have deliberately perpetrated on others, and instead looking for sly, devious ways of passing the blame off on somebody else – usually, the real victim(s).
You PC buffoons just despise the concept of people being responsible for their own actions, don’tcha? If that took hold, then all your beloved “victims” would vanish – and then who would you be able to feel smugly superior to, while showing the world how fucking “”moral” and “noble” you are for defending them?
Now go dust off your Reverend Al shrine and pray for a brain. Miracles can happen.
Extreme media attention just fetching more bad behavioral patterns in kids brains. I’m keeping my child as far as possible from all that ship.
The story actually reminds me Minority Report too…