A mass killing may have been averted at a Michigan high school, and it shows everything wrong with the FBI, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office AND the Broward County School system. In fact, I hope they’re all paying attention to this right now.
This is an example of concerned citizens doing their part, REAL cops doing REAL police work, and it shows what’s possible when all of the above come together.
New England Patriots receiver Julian Edelman was hanging out with one of his teammates in Texas a couple weeks ago when he got a disturbing direct message on his Instagram account. It read:
“Dude, there is a kid in your comment section says he’s going to shoot up a school, I think you should alert the authority.”
Edelman immediately contacted his assistant back in Boston and asked her to look into it. It couldn’t have been easy. Edelman is one of the most popular wide receivers in the NFL. Finding one comment out of the thousands on her bosses Instagram would be like finding a needle in a stack of needles. But eventually, she came to this message:
I’m going to shoot my school up watch the news.
She immediately called 911 and a police officer arrived soon after.
The Parkland killer left a nearly identical message on Youtube, but the FBI proceeded to drop the ball.
So, back to the Parkland shooting. If this were that scenario, this is where it would have stopped. In fact, the circumstances were VERY similar. The Parkland killer left a nearly identical message on Youtube, but the FBI proceeded to drop the ball. Not so with the Boston Police Department.
The Boston PD assigned two detectives to look into Edelman’s Instagram comment. They immediately made an emergency records request to determine the user's email and IP address. They were able to use that information to trace the location to a town in Michigan.
The Boston detectives then contacted the police in Michigan who then went straight to the address where the message originated from. They found a 14-year-old boy in possession of 2 rifles. The boy eventually confessed to making the threat and admitted that his anger was directed at the middle school he attends. He has now been charged with a felony and is sitting in a juvenile detention center.
We already have the laws and procedures in place to protect us.
This is how it’s done. This story has it all. Responsible and concerned private citizens, smart detective work and extremely competent law enforcement officers following procedure BY THE BOOK. We don’t need MORE gun legislation and red tape. We already have the laws and procedures in place to protect us.
If they were followed like this every time, we’d have fewer tragedies.