Kansas School Shooting Plot Thwarted By Online Chat

By Linda Orlando

In Riverton, Kansas, a tiny town of about 600 people in the southeast corner of the state, five teenage boys ages 16 to 18 were arrested Thursday for plotting a violent shooting rampage at their high school. The arrests came just in time, because the plan was to be carried out Thursday afternoon between noon and 1 p.m., on the anniversary of the Columbine massacre in 1999.

Officials at Riverton High School began investigating on Tuesday after they learned about a threatening message that had been posted on the popular website MySpace.com. Sheriff Steve Norman said that the message talked about the significance of April 20th being Adolf Hitler’s birthday as well as the anniversary of the Columbine shootings. The 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado was carried out by two students wearing trench coats who killed 13 people before killing themselves.

"The message…was brief, but it stated that there was going to be a shooting at the Riverton school and that people should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets," Sheriff Norman said. School officials quickly identified the student who had posted the message and talked to several of his friends. But school officials were skeptical about the seriousness of the message until Wednesday night, when a woman in North Carolina was chatting online on the MySpace.com site. She chatted with one of the teenage boys involved in the plot, who sent her a list of about a dozen potential victims, including at least one staff member. The woman immediately notified authorities in North Carolina, who contacted the sheriff’s department in Kansas.

Sheriff’s deputies arrested the five teenage boys and searched their homes. In one boy’s bedroom deputies found guns, ammunition, knives, and coded messages. In two of the suspects’ school lockers, authorities found documents about firearms. "What the resounding theme is: They were actually going to do this," Norman said. When deputies questioned the suspects, they described how they had planned to wear black trench coats and disable the school’s camera system before beginning their attack. Authorities believe they had been plotting the rampage since the beginning of the school year.

Norman said that because the list of potential victims were mostly popular students, he believes the suspects may have been bullied and seeking revenge. "I think there was probably some bullying, name calling, chastising," he said. Norman plans to ask prosecutors to bring charges against the five teens for conspiring to commit murder, and the state attorney general would prosecute the case.