When rumor, the Internet and school violence fears collide

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http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/08/10604539-when-rumor-the-internet-and-school-violence-fears-collide

“He’d be the type to bring a gun to school.”

These words – or something close – were allegedly uttered by a female student in a high school classroom last Friday in Girard, Pa., about one hour’s drive from Chardon, Ohio. The object of the comment was Austin Carner, a 17-year-old junior and outsider at the school who has had minor brushes with the law.

By Sunday night, those words had morphed via social media and text messages into an explicit threat that Carner was planning to come to Girard High School the next day – the one-week anniversary of the Chardon shooting in which three students died – with a gun.
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Police went to his house Sunday afternoon, questioned him and searched his room, and school administrators fielded hundreds of phone calls from concerned parents on Monday. About half of Carner’s classmates decided not to risk it and either stayed home or left school early.

But when police left Carner’s house hours later, they weren’t toting weapons or leading the teen away in cuffs. They found nothing suspicious in their search and, after questioning Carner and his parents, decided that concerns that he was planning violence were false.

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1. Yeah, those words just morphed by themselves, nobody did anything...

Good thing the kid was white, or he might not have survived the house search.