Florida authorities released a video Friday after arresting of a 15-year-old teen accused of posting an online mass shooting threat in a video game chat platform.
Volusia County Sheriff’s officials posted the video on Facebook to share how serious the consequences are when people threaten a shooting, regardless of age and regardless of whether they actually planned to follow through with the threat.
The video showed two Volusia County Sheriff’s officials speaking to the mother of the teen outside of her Daytona Beach home. The teen is accused of threatening to “kill seven people at a minimum” at Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach. While the mother argued that her child was still a little boy, an officer tried to explain that they take every threat seriously.
Mother: “But he’s just a little kid playing a video game.
Officer: “How do we know he’s not going to be like the kid from Parkland, or he’s not going to be like the kid that shot up Sandy Hook? We don’t know that,”
Mother: “These kids say stuff like that all the time. It’s a joke to them. It’s a game. And it’s so wrong. I hate that game.”
A student from Seabreeze High School was arrested recently after posting a comment on a video game chat platform. The comment was:"I Dalton Barnhart vow to bring my fathers m15 to school and kill 7 people at a minimum"The comment was reported to the FBI, and the FBI contacted us.The name "Dalton Barnhart" was fake, and the young man responsible for the comment insisted it was a joke.Joke or not, these types of comments are felonies under the law. After the mass violence we've seen in Florida and across the country, law enforcement officers have a responsibility to investigate and charge those who choose to make these types of threatening statements.
Posted by Volusia County Sheriff's Office on Monday, August 19, 2019
When the officer explained that the teen would be charged with a felony, the mother, clearly upset argued that her son was “not one of the crazy people.”
“He’s just a little boy! He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s 15 and he’s still a little boy and he’s not one of the crazy people out there doing stuff!”
The mother admitted that there was a gun in the home. However, she insisted her son only meant the comment as a joke.
Regardless of the woman’s attempts to keep her son out of trouble, authorities took the boy to a local juvenile detention facility and charged him with making a threat to cause a mass shooting.
“Joke or not, these types of comments are felonies under the law,” Volusia authorities posted on Facebook.
“After the mass violence we’ve seen in Florida and across the country, law enforcement officers have a responsibility to investigate and charge those who choose to make these types of threatening statements.”
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[Feature Photo: Volusia PD/Facebook screenshot]
