A 14-year-old student who last year was either expelled or withdrawn from in-school attendance at Buddy Taylor Middle School over disciplinary issues was arrested today and charged with a second-degree felony for allegedly threatening to shoot up the school. An investigation found he’d had no means to carry out the act, and that he’d been joking about it in chats.
What led to the charge against C.S. of “written threats to kill,” as the law phrases the offense, was an exchange on Instagram between the student and a former school-mate–a current student at Buddy Taylor Middle School. The Buddy Taylor student received a message from C.S. showing C.S. holding what looked like a semi-automatic black gun.
The student at first thought that C.S. was joking, and asked C.S. if he was for real. “No,” C.S. told him. C.S. then asked the student if he was going to tell. When the student told him there’d been a lot of school shootings this year–the federal government reported that 2021 marked a 20-year high for school shootings, with a total of 93 resulting in injuries or deaths–C.S. said he was going to shoot up Buddy Taylor on Wednesday (what would have been today). He asked the other student if he wanted to come with him. The student declined. C.S. again said he was joking.
When th conversation was over, the student in Flagler showed the exchange to his mother. By the time she looked up C.S.’s page, he had removed the picture of himself with the apparent gun and blocked the student from seeing his profile.
The school’s resource deputy met with the Buddy Taylor Middle School student who’d engaged in the conversation with C.S. Then, using various means now easily accessible to locate a social media user’s friends, the deputy found another Buddy Taylor Middle School student who was connected to C.S., and through that student found a brief video on C.S.’s page of someone showing a gun, but not featuring C.S. himself. That student also mentioned the a deleted post where C.S. allegedly referred to shooting up Buddy Taylor Middle School.
The deputy located C.S.’s mother, who works in Palm Coast. She said her son was playing with a BB gun that belonged to his cousin, and eventually provided an address in Deltona where C.S. was staying. She said she would drive her son back to Flagler to cooperate with the investigation. She did so, bringing her son to the county jail, where he was processed but not kept. Students are usually returned to their parents’ custody pending the disposition of the case. In such cases, they generally get probationary terms.
“The investigation determined there was no active threat as the former student was in Volusia County and had no means of transportation to the school,” a sheriff’s release stated.
“Threats such as these are not a joke and will always be taken seriously and quickly investigated,” Sheriff Rick Staly said. “We don’t like making these arrests, but we will protect Flagler County students to the best of our ability any time a threat such as this one occurs. Thank you to the parent who found messages on their child’s phone and then reported it to us so we could take swift action to prevent an incident from occurring within Flagler County Schools and making a quick arrest.”
Jimbo99 says
Sad that the law protects his name & photo from being published. The rest of us need to know who he is so we can limit our risk exposure(s) for being his next victim. We need to know who we’re dealing with for a dysfunctional child & family. If he isn’t making this world a better place, nobody wants him around here. I can’t imagine him still having a bb gun after this. It’s really an easy decision to make here at 14 yo for the parent(s).
ASF says
It sounds like this child needs more intensive help and supervision than any member of his/her family has been, thus far, able to provide. I hope no one gets seriously hurt before this case winds its way through the juvenile justice system.
ASF says
This is no joke. It sounds like this child needs more intensive help and supervision than any member of his/her family has been, thus far, able to provide. I hope no one gets seriously hurt before this case winds its way through the juvenile justice system.
ASF says
This is no joke.
It sounds like this child needs more intensive help and supervision than his family has, thus far, been able to provide.
I hope no one gets seriously hurt before this case winds it way through the juvenile justice system.
FlaglerLive says
The law does not protect his name from being published. It’s our decision not to publish minors’ names facing charges, in most (not all) circumstances.
Me says
Please get this child the help he needs otherwise he will end up in prison. Very sad.
Hammond says
Don’t understand that my grandson was a minor and his pic was in newspaper.
Skibum says
I will say for the umpteenth time, every single school district should have a mandatory class, even if only by video, at the start of each school year outlining how serious it is for a student to make verbal or written threats to “shoot up the school”. It should be documented in each student’s file that they have taken the class and understand the seriousness of such behavior to include the potential for expulsion and criminal prosecution even if they were intending it as a joke, which it is definitely not. Once this is completed and documented, that information can be presented in court as evidence if ever needed in the future. The only way schools will see a decrease in these threats is by increased education in the consequences for it, because we keep hearing over and over again that the student was “joking” and didn’t know they could be prosecuted for a felony for doing what they did. I really believe most if not all of them already do know it is wrong, but it needs to be documented in order for the courts to be able to sufficiently hold them accountable.
The ORIGINAL land of no turn signals says
Give a a trophy and send him back to class.A reward for bad behavior in this now snowflake society.
Ray W. says
Decades ago, a friend of mine (now deceased) represented a highly ranked Volusia County corrections official who was accused of plotting to violate the law.
The issue? It seems the official, while drinking in a bar, felt the great need to discuss in great detail with a fellow patron his plans to import Spanish gold recovered from shipwrecks into the United States and sell it to collectors. He acknowledged that he knew his intended actions were illegal and stated that he had carefully thought out his plan for circumventing the law and actually fully explained the specifics of his plan. He hoped to use any money gained to supplement his retirement pension. He was planning to soon retire. The fellow patron went to the police. The official was arrested and, eventually, tried on federal charges.
My friend, at the close of the government’s case in chief, argued in his motion for judgment of acquittal that sharing in explicit detail a fantasy about a future crime, without the current means to carry out the intended acts, was not a crime. Thoughts, without more, are not criminal, he argued. The federal district judge in Orlando agreed and dismissed the charges and discharged the jurors.
I am not saying that no crime occurred in this juvenile’s instance. That is not my decision to make, nor is it the decision of any other FlaglerLive commenter. If the case makes it out of the State Attorney’s office as either a juvenile petition or a formal adult charging document, that decision will be reserved to whichever judge is assigned to the case. Do not forget, however, that the criminal justice train’s wheels are in motion and the defense attorney’s job will be to get his client off the tracks before the train runs over the child. However, I am positing that there is a point or a line at which evidence of anyone’s fantasies about how he or she can manipulate the future just might fall short of the necessary level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the child’s required intent to commit a crime.
cgm says
I grew up in the 60s -70s if me or my friends did something like this our fathers would have kicked the stupid right out of our A–!
John says
It was a joke they said it in the article they had no intentions of carrying out the act
Jhon says
No he won’t anymore considering the fact he did 21 days in juvie