AP Wire | 10/19/2005 | Boaz teen’s high school essay about “Killer Day” viewed as threat — This girl must be a hand full at home, don’t you think? I have to assume she’s a satirist with no clue about the laws that forbid threatening the President. I doubt 1 out of 100 kids know about it. Hopefully she’ll just get a good “talking to.” As for “Killer Day” it’s funny. Now if it turns out she wears a black trenchcoat all day long and collects weapons, then that’s another story. Perhaps the Uncensored readers can dig up a picture of the girl or more details.
BOAZ, Ala. – A Boaz High School freshman who wrote an essay proposing a “Killer Day” when everyone would be allowed to kill two people to relieve stress has been charged with making a terrorist threat.
The 14-year-old girl, who also wrote that she wanted to kill President Bush, was arrested last week and is scheduled for a Nov. 1 hearing. Court officials declined to release her name or provide other information Wednesday, citing the confidentiality rules of Alabama’s youthful offender law.
Boaz Police Chief Terry Davis said students were to write an essay in an English class last week on a new federal holiday they would like to see Congress pass.
Davis said the teacher who read the 14-year-old’s essay gave it to Principal Lowell Smith and Assistant Principal Judy Bollinger after reading it. The police chief said a decision was made to press charges after the matter was referred to city schools Superintendent Leland Dishman and other system officials.
“I don’t know if it was a joke,” Davis told The Huntsville Times. “But if it was, it was done in bad taste.”
All this action in tough talkin’ Alabama yet.
found by Ima Fish
I guess I have no problem with a school talking to a student that does something like this, or even making her stay after class. But I find it disturbing that the police are involved MERELY because of something she wrote. If the school finds additional evidence to support that she’s a threat, that’s fine. But if it’s merely a writing, and if that’s all the school has, then the cops never should have been called.
How many more incidents like this will have to occur before we stop calling ourselves the land of the free?!
A picture huh?! Maybe, just maybe, she’s on the school’s cheerleading team!
http://www.piratepride.org/cheer.htm
Then, again, maybe not. But when is it NOT a good time to look at cheerleaders?!
I didn’t realize that humor was illegal if it was in bad taste. If that is true, its the electric chair for the cast of Blue Collar TV!
Bad taste to them, Satirical Comedy to me. Good for her, it’s great publicity for her new professional career. Bad for the rest, but then again, I doubt any of them were up for a Mensa membership anytime soon.
I miss the days of common sense.
” But if it’s merely a writing, and if that’s all the school has, then the cops never should have been called.” Ima Fish got that right. Unfortunately, the school seems to be operating in CYA mode. Find anything that can be interpreted as a threat (whether it is or not) and automatically call in the police. This is like schools that strictly enforce zero tolerance policies regarding weapons. Common sense there is out the window. It is much easier to enforce the zero tolerance policy than to investigate the situation.
RonD, my pet theory on zero tolerance policies is that when there is NO discretion or judgment calls there are NO mistakes. Thus the administration never has to think about a course of action and, even worse, they are never at fault when they go overboard. “We were just following our zero tolerance policy.”
I can muster up a little sympathy for the school authorities. Nobody really knows much about the leading indicators of killers rage.
I’m guessing that they have had not training in how to differentiate future Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises from your everyday death-obsessed, black lipsticked, self-tatooed, anti-social Goth kids.
So they use the options which are at their disposal and, probably, that’s call the cops.
Better, of course, would be proactive intervention by highly trained social workers but I’m guessing Alabama hasn’t funded those!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
So funny, this is the time when we say: “This only happens in America!”
X-D
Mmmmmm…..cheerleaders….
🙂
Mike T
It would be interesting to see if they would have called the cops if Clinton were still president.
Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that 14-year olds daydream of killing the president? Has our society degraded so far that this level of hatred towards our leaders has infiltrated our grade schools?
Smith, with out current president, I’d be more disturbed to discover that everyone did NOT want to kill him.
Imafish, that’s funny.
Could I be investigated if I said that I would like to kill everyone that voted for him? Is it the psychotic retards fault if a bunch of other people put him into power?
BTW, what happened to the importance of word usage? Is there not a difference between “I would like to kill him” and “I’m going to kill him”? I guess when you run the Big Brother Bush administration (like Sadaam did) then you can incriminate and harass whomever you want.
How many of us, I wonder, have written mush brained idiotic drivel as angst ridden teens? At least the kid is writing, creating. What the prof should have done is picked her effort as a debate piece, and let everyone have their way with it. That would have been more interesting than locking the kid down. And yeah, maybe have her mother check under her bed to make sure there is no weapons cache hidden thereunder. Other than that, hey, let the kids grow.
How come adults like Leno and O’Brien get paid to joke about killing Bush but kids detention for joking about the same thing? Worried that the kids have better aim?
THAT IS FUCKING REDICULOUS GET OVER IT! SHE IS 14!!!!
I attend Boaz High School and the way they put the situation is nothing to its similarity. The girl is a trouble maker in the first place and no she is no cheerleader! Yes they had an assignment and she wrote what she felt that she needed to write. She thought the assignment would be funny if she wrote about it this way. Basically she was just wanting attention and guess what she got it. They did not actually arrest her but they took her out of school and down to the police station. For one you can’t actually arrest a minor. She was only suspended for a couple days of school so the situation could be tooking care of. That was basically all she got plus a good lesson to learn from. Boaz High School gives students great opportunitys to excel in they have college classes you can attend, online classes, distance learning classes, and many more classes. This girl didn’t want to excel herself like the other students do, she wanted to make fun of the system.