Threatening text messages will get you nowhere, high school teenagers

October 2nd, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

Here’s a heartwarming little story coming out of the great state of Ohio: Coventry High School’s quarterback received a death threat via text message before a game against Norton High School this weekend.

We had 10 deputies, additional deputies, all around the football game”, explained Lt. Shane Barker of the Summit County Sheriff’s Department.

According to investigators someone sent the quarterback of the Coventy Comets a text message on his cell phone, stating he would be shot after making the first pass of Friday’s game.

The Superintendent of the Coventry School District, Rusty Chaboudy, says concern for students’ safety actually started two weeks earlier when some students from a different school district got into a fight with some students from Coventry High School. Chaboudy says the following Monday another fight ensued.

School administrators and sheriff’s deputies took the phone threat seriously.

Deputies tracked down the cell phone number and arrested two teenagers, one a 15-year-old boy, the other, 18-year-old Leland Stewart.

Investigators say both teenagers confessed to sending the text message but said the text was meant to be a joke.

“It might have been a joke to them but it wasn’t taken as a joke by the police or the administration.” explained Chaboudy. “In this day and age with all the things that’re going on all over the country obviously it’s not a joke.”

No, it’s certainly never a joke to say you are going to shoot someone. (Unless it’s your wife. Then it’s OK. Kidding!) And man, it’s never my prerogative to take high school kids to task, but um, if you are going to text message someone something, they are going to find out where it came from — that’s how cell phones work in this day and age. (Can you text message from a pay phone?)

So let this be a lesson to everyone out there: threaten people the old-fashioned way. Send them an envelope with a bunch of letters cut out of a magazine and glued on a piece of paper to form a sentence. Not only is it harder to trace, but you’ll score creativity points too!

{HT: SbB}

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