Middle school: A tough time for many, with trying to maintain grades, develop a sense of self, and attempting to fit in. These are the concerns for most middle schoolers, but the students of Leewood K-8 in Miami-Dade had something much worse to worry about: their own mortality, as their classmate threated in a group chat to shoot and kill LGBTQ people and minorities, according to CBS.
In the chat, the thirteen-year-old boy said that he didn’t care about Black Lives Matter or the LGBT community and that he was planning on shooting them. He also dismissed the hardships that minorities and LGBT people may face in the United States and said “Wanna hear what is oppressed? My Shotgun ammo because I am wasting it on minorities like you. Do you think I won’t hesitate to shoot you?… I am tracking your location” and that he has military training so he can kill them “real quick.”
According to LGBTQ Nation, the boy also wrote “I am on my way to murder you. I hate not only you and your ‘LGBT community’ but I also hate your ‘blacklivesmatter’ [sic] because, guess what, white lives matter too” and that the only reason that people were shocked about this is that he’s a “straight white male.” So now we’ve established that the race of this boy, which is not important in and of itself, but that piece of information will become relevant later in this post. But take that all in – this is coming from a thirteen-year-old. What an awful thought that someone so young can be filled with so much hate.
After he wrote those messages, someone in the group chat brought them to the attention of the school’s administration and the boy was eventually arrested on felony charges of threatening to kill. Luckily the school has deemed the threats noncredible. Many parents of the students at Leewood agree and have said that the school is excellent and the administration will handle this situation properly.
The boy’s grandfather also said that the threats are not credible because he (the boy) is “a good kid” and that he can’t hate minorities because “he’s a minority himself.” The boy literally said in the group chat that he’s a straight, white male so I don’t fully understand his grandfather’s comment about him being a minority. Perhaps he is of the mindset that straight people and white people are now the minority in the United States despite both demographics being the majority in this country.
Now do I think that the threats are credible? No, I don’t. I think this is just a case of teens doing stupid things for shock value, as, I’m assuming, that the boy wouldn’t really advertise that he was going to shoot people, he just would. Plus, at thirteen it’s very unlikely that he has any military experience. Still though, I have to wonder what his life at home is like because this type of mentality doesn’t just manifest out of nowhere. He had to have been taught to hate like this somewhere. I’m glad that he was arrested so he could learn that his actions, whether or not they were serious, have very real consequences.
Source: CBS