Four Haysville Middle School Students Have Been Arrested On Murder Conspiracy Charges Over Alleged Bomb Threat In Kansas
Four Haysville Middle School students have been arrested on conspiracy to commit first-degree murder charges after the Kansas youths allegedly made a bomb threat against the school. Each of the four eighth graders had one such charge levied against them on Monday.
Haysville Middle School resource officers were alerted to the threat against the Kansas school not long after the students arrived last Thursday. According to a KAKE News report, the four middle school students issued not just a bomb threat, but a vow to commit mass murder by shooting students and staff on the campus.
4 students charged with conspiracy to commit murder after threat to Haysville Middle School – WIBW https://t.co/5X4I3zPdzu
— Tom (@megasafesearch) May 17, 2016
The Haysville Middle School students issued the bomb threat via social media. One male student at the school noticed several of his peers talking about the mass murder threat and told his parents, who in turn called the police, the Daily Mail reports.
Haysville Police Chief Jeff Whitfield told the local media outlet the four middle school students were quickly identified and arrested. As of Monday afternoon, the Kansas eighth-grade students were still in police custody and awaiting preliminary hearings on the murder conspiracy charges levied against them, the Wichita Eagle reports. It is not yet known if the Haysville Middle School students will be charged as juveniles or adults.
Chief Jeff Whitfield also said that while law enforcement respects the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, he said there is “a line that gets crossed.”
“Parents are encouraged to monitor what their children are doing on the internet and discuss internet safety with them as well as encourage them to report anything suspicious or dangerous to an adult immediately,” Chief Whitfield said. “Any cases of this nature are taken very seriously will be investigated thoroughly. The safety and security of our community and schools is our paramount concern.”
#316ICT Students charged in plot against Haysville Middle School: Each eighth grader was cha… https://t.co/0P5LjhhsnT#Wichita#Kansas
— News316ICT (@News316ICT) May 16, 2016
“I don’t know what would really scare some kids to want to blow up a school,” Haysville alumni Nick Mast said during an interview with KSN News. “That’s a really crazy thing to talk about. Even talking about it is bad. You don’t even know if they would have done it and you don’t want to wait and see if it would happen.”
All four Haysville Middle School students charged in the bomb threat investigation were males, according to a KFDI News report. One of the school mass murder threat suspects is 13, the remaining three are 14-years of age.
According to the Haysville Middle School website, the facility opened in 2008 and is one of two middle schools serving students in Unified School District 261. The Kansas middle school serves students coming from both Oatville and Prairie Elementary Schools. There are approximately 575 sixth-through-eighth graders on the middle school campus.
Haysville is part of Sedgwick County and is a suburb of Wichita. The city, known as the “Peach Capital of Kansas,” according to Wikipedia, has a population of about 10,826 residents.
Between 2013 and October of 2015, there have reportedly been a total of 185 school shootings on the campuses of public schools and colleges in the United States.
Since 2007, the number of homeschooled students in America has been on the rise, according to a Time 4 Learning report. Approximately 1.77 million students were educated at home in 2012, a National Household Education Survey Program study revealed. That figure represents an 18 percent increase of homeschooled students since 2007.
Do school shootings or the increase in foiled attempts of such mass murders, prompt you to consider homeschooling your children or support concealed carry by adult students and teachers?
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