COMMENTARY — Sunday night’s scene was all too familiar. A police chief addressing a crowd of angry, confused citizens. At a school.
A troubled young man compiled a “kill list” in his head of lives he wanted to end. Three weeks earlier when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the same kid freaked out his classmates by stating he wanted to be a school shooter. The boy lives in a house where multiple firearms are kept, and where both parents have had more than casual contact with law enforcement. An FBI task force is on the case, and a crisis response team was brought in to counsel students who were traumatized, or who just need to talk to someone.
But this wasn’t playing out on television or on a live Facebook feed from a far-off city. It was happening at Ocean Breeze Elementary, in one of the safest neighborhoods in one of the safest cities in Florida. It doesn’t feel blissfully safe anymore to a great many students and parents.
Fortunately the gathering of more than 300 people was not a press conference detailing a gory school shooting that had occurred. It was about a potential tragedy that had been thwarted.
Hopefully.
Principal Laurie Hering said, “I’m hoping we can look back on this and say this was a moment in time when those red flags that we saw were responded to.”
That depends upon what that sixth-grader and others like him become when they grow up. Now that school officials, law enforcement and parents are acutely aware there’s a problem, that burden is on the uneasy village tasked with raising the children.
Prosecutors, detectives and the FBI task force determined the sixth-grader’s threats to kill students and teachers did not rise to the level of a credible and immediate threat that would constitute a crime.
He didn’t write the list down. He didn’t say how and when he intended to kill them. Those specific elements are required to detain the student at a juvenile facility and pursue formal charges.
There was not enough probable cause for State Attorney Phil Archer’s office to ask a judge for a warrant to search the boy’s home after the family refused to let local police in the door.
And though logic would dictate that this child must be suffering an emotional crisis, his behavior was not enough to warrant imposition of Florida’s Baker Act to involuntarily commit the boy for 72 hours of psychiatric evaluation.
What about that new school safety law Gov. Rick Scott signed on March 9? Indian Harbour Beach City Manager Mark Ryan said last week that city and county law enforcement officials are still reading the sweeping legislation to determine how it might help in this case. While I’m not shocked, it is disturbing that there’s no expertise available from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office to help small-town police departments understand and employ this complex and problematic 105-page law that now governs the State of Florida.
In the meantime, an armed, uniformed police officer is posted at Ocean Breeze, with the city and the school itself cobbling together the funding because there’s no money in the budget for that kind of protection.
After FBI agents showed up at the home one block from school, the boy’s family finally allowed officers to verify that weapons in the home were secured. Chief David Butler said he also gave them some gun locks. Counselors are working with the family to get at the root of the student’s problems, because a pre-teen kid doesn’t just wake up one morning and formulate a “kill list” of classmates and teachers. Services can be refused at any time, however, as treatment cannot be mandated without an arrest or court order.
Hering said the student was suspended for 10 school days beginning March 14. The Brevard County School Board will rule on punishment up to expulsion, but confidentiality regulations bar school officials from sharing the outcome – causing parents to wonder why the offending student seems more protected than the hundreds of innocent children who didn’t threaten to kill anyone.
The boy said he made the threatening statements defensively, to stop other kids from picking on him.
Parents of kids being bullied every day in Brevard Public Schools wonder if the very real problems school officials claim do not exist “on paper” will finally be handled so situations like the one at Ocean Breeze do not escalate into crises. School Board member Tina Descovich said the District has “a zero-tolerance policy on bullying.” Ocean Breeze has had only two documented bullying incidents this year. Parents should contact Descovich directly if bullying problems are not properly addressed at the school level.
We are officially awake. What happens next will show who we truly are as a community.