Oklahoma police arrested a high school student on charges that he was plotting to carry out a shooting and bombing massacre at his school, the Tulsa World newspaper reported on Saturday.
Sammie Eaglebear Chavez, 18, was arrested at his home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, on Friday, the same day that a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
Police alleged in an affidavit that Chavez tried to recruit other Bartlesville High School students to help him lure classmates into the school auditorium, where he planned to chain the doors shut and start shooting them, the newspaper said.
“He also told them that if the students assisting him did not do what they were supposed to do, he would not hesitate to kill them and/or himself,” the newspaper quoted the police affidavit as saying.
Chavez told classmates that he would put bombs by the auditorium door and detonate them when police arrived, the affidavit said, according to the newspaper.
He was jailed on a charge of attempting or conspiring to perform an act of violence and his bond was set at $1 million.
Police said they could not comment on Saturday. Court records indicate a hearing is scheduled for January 11.
An arrest warrant was issued on Thursday, a day after Chavez allegedly solicited classmates in the school cafeteria to help him carry out the plot. A student notified a school administrator, who called police.
The police affidavit said Chavez had used a school computer to research guns, pipe bombs and the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in which 12 students and a teacher were killed in Littleton, Colorado. It also said he had told a teacher last week that he had bought a Colt .45 gun, though it was unclear whether he actually had one.
(Reuters)
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Something has changed at YWN – is it appropriate to use words like animal in a headline – that kind of leans towards tabloid journalism – it’s not really a refined, Yiddish way to report. Think about it.