Deep Reads: Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to jail. - Post Reports

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[00:07]
John Woodrow Cox
Hi, Hannah.
[00:08]
Hannah Natenson
Hi, John.
[00:09]
John Woodrow Cox
Why don't we introduce ourselves?
[00:11]
Hannah Natenson
Sure. I'm Hannah Natenson and I cover education for the Washington Post. And pretty much since I've started, I've had to write about school shootings. From a seven year old who shot his teacher in Virginia to this past fall when a 14 year old shot two classmates and two teachers in Georgia.
[00:29]
John Woodrow Cox
Yeah. My name is John Woodrow Cox. I'm an enterprise reporter at the Washington Post. I have a focus on narrative reporting. I have reported on school shootings and gun violence, how it affects children for the past eight years. I wrote a book about this subject, wrote about a school shooting in South Carolina, wrote about the Newtown school shooting, Uvalde, Parkland. I wrote about the mass shooting in Las Vegas. So, you know, this has been a big part of my life and the work that Hannah and I have done together for a long time.
[01:03]
Hannah Natenson
I don't normally ask John to tell me all his work because I, I have been an avid follower of John's work since college. I would read John's pieces and it made me want to go into journalism and especially want to come work at the Washington Post for the kind of narrative work that he always did and still does.
[01:22]
John Woodrow Cox
Oh, that's very kind. Although Hannah is already better than I am, so that's not.
[01:27]
Hannah Natenson
That's fake news.
[01:28]
John Woodrow Cox
Which is why we're, which is why we work together. Now. I don't have to. I don't have to try as hard. So we wrote this story that you will hear in a moment, and it's part of our Deep Reads series, which showcases narrative journalism here at the Post. The story is about the ripple effects of the huge number of threats that explode across the country after school shootings and in this specific case, how that phenomenon played out in one community. So our reporting for this started actually on another story where Hannah and I worked together very closely last year after the Apalachee shooting in Georgia, a case in which a freshman killed two students and two teachers. And one thing we noticed in the weeks right after that shooting was this. Just a huge number of threats that were being made against other schools. And a lot of kids were being arrested for making threats, mostly on social media. So, Hannah, if you want to talk a little bit about how we launched into trying to quantify that.
[02:39]
Hannah Natenson
So we sort of went about it in two ways. One thing is we went to some of the nation's largest school districts. I think we contacted close to 250 of them and we asked them for data on the number of threats they Got in the two weeks that followed the last four really deadly school shootings, from Apalachi this past year to the Oxford shooting in Michigan in 2021. And so we had all these districts that we sought records from, seeing how many threats came in. And then we also, John and I together read through 20,000 news articles to try to track how many arrests happened that were reported in the two weeks after each of these shootings.
[03:21]
John Woodrow Cox
Yeah, and that was a major undertaking. But what really struck us was there were more threats, but there was a disproportionate increase in arrests. So obviously we had this big idea, we had all this data, it was national, but it was hard to sort of wrap your mind around, I think, as a reader, to say, well, what does this mean? What does this look like? What's context here? So we thought the way to tell this story is through one place. So we came across this case in Volusia County, Florida, where the sheriff there was so fed up that he was actually perp walking children as young as 11 years old.
[04:03]
Hannah Natenson
And just for people who don't know what perp walking is, it's when law enforcement takes someone they're taking into detention or arrest and they release their name publicly, maybe have them walk along and be filmed. So it's a very public outing. And sheriffs, after this shooting and all these threats were doing this to children.
[04:21]
John Woodrow Cox
Yeah. And that's extremely rare. I mean, it's virtually unheard of that you would take somebody who's 11, certainly, or 12 or 13, and publicized their name, their face, you know, put it out there for the world because they've not been convicted of any crime. So this person is being labeled with whatever you've accused them of forever. So Hannah and I went there to talk to the sheriff, to talk to a school resource officer, to talk to a principal at a school, to talk to some of the students who'd been arrested and outed and perp walked and who had spent, know, in some cases, three weeks in. In jail. I think every single person we talked to in this story felt like their perspective had been overlooked. Every single one of them.
[05:05]
Hannah Natenson
And I just want to say one thing that John has always done so well and that made me admire his work in the first place, is he always talks to the children, the actual children going to school. And so we made sure to do that here. Both the children who were arrested for making the threats and the kids who were in school when the threat came in and were terrified, even though it wasn't real, but they didn't know that.
[05:26]
John Woodrow Cox
You know, it's really important to me that readers understand their perspective from their perspective, not from everybody else. So, you know, I've always found it maybe to be easier to talk to kids than people might assume. They have a lot to say. They have opinions. Even at very, very young ages, they have very clear perspectives on whatever it is that they've gone through. So I try to be very frank with what it is that I'm doing, who I am. I explain to the kid who I am, what I do. I'll show them articles on my phone, I'll show them my profile page with my photo. And then I just tell them why I'm there. And I really just try to get them talking sort of generally. I also tell them that I'm not in charge. Every adult in their life is in charge of them. I'm not in charge. I'm not an authority figure. If they don't want to answer something, they don't have to. And I tell them that over and over and over again. When I went to Uvalde to write about the children who were killed there, my very first night there, I met a little girl who had been across the hallway from the two classrooms where all of her friends were killed. She could hear her best friend dying. And I went there a little less than a month after the shooting. And I met her on the very first night I'm in town. And it was really just for her to get to know me and for her family to get comfortable with me. And within 30 minutes of having met her, she launched into a retelling of that day in great specificity, really detailed. I mean, you know, she told me about hearing her friend's scream. She could recognize her voice. And I paused her at one point and said, just so you know, we don't have to talk about this now, we can wait. And she said, no, I want to talk about it now. So that when I talk about, you know, giving children agency when putting them in charge, that's what that means. Like, it wasn't my job to tell her this is too soon for us to talk about it. It was just to say, you lead the way. And I think that's Hannah and I very much took that approach in this story is just explaining why it is that we're there. And I think we would both attest to this, that we are often the first people in these kids lives who they are totally willing to open up to.
[07:37]
Hannah Natenson
And that was true here for sure, I would say. So we reported this story over four months seeking all this data from school districts.
[07:49]
John Woodrow Cox
And then we spent a little less than a week down in Florida doing the reporting there in Volusia. It was a very, very, very quick trip and just sort of it all came together.
[07:59]
Hannah Natenson
So I think I was there Monday to Friday.
[08:02]
John Woodrow Cox
Really? Yeah, I just know. I just. It was so strikingly.
[08:05]
Hannah Natenson
It was short. It was short.
[08:06]
John Woodrow Cox
It was so strikingly short. This is the sort of story that I think you'd think like we embedded for like two weeks in this place. But like everybody was cooperative.
[08:22]
Hannah Natenson
Okay, here's our story called. Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to J.
[08:39]
John Woodrow Cox
The Dragnet first snagged a girl named Lori who was lying in bed amid her stuffed unicorns and hello Kitty dolls. When the ninth grader had what she thought was a funny idea, she opened Instagram and over a hot pink background began to type, blowing the SKL up TMR. Blowing the school up tomorrow. It was September 10th, six days after another 14 year old was accused of gunning down two students and a pair of teachers at Apalachee High in Georgia. At Lori's home in Florida, she posted the message and forgot about it until a few hours later when a friend urged her to delete what she'd written. It was too late, of course, because the Internet is forever. And because unbeknownst to Laurie and hundreds of other kids, law enforcement's tolerance for threats of any kind made anywhere by anyone was nearing zero. The next day, the girl was placed in handcuffs that barely fit her wrists, charged with a felony, and taken to a Volusia county detention center for three weeks. The day after that, another 14 year old was charged for a comment on Instagram that read, if y'all crybabies don't shut up, I'm gonna shoot up your school. The day after that, a 13 year old was charged for a post on TikTok that read, I will be shooting up Heritage middle school on 9, 1324. More threats would rapidly follow in Volusia county and across the country, as if a pathogen had been set loose. An analysis of news reports by the Washington Post found that at least 477 people, 90% of them students, were arrested in the two weeks after the Georgia massacre. That's nearly 100 more than in the aftermath of the three previous mass school shootings combined. Volusia's elected sheriff Mike Chitwood, a registered independent and brash Philadelphia native, decided he had had enough. In the past week, he deployed dozens of deputies and spent an extra $21,000 in taxpayer money. On the previous night alone, his Office had received 54 tips. At a news conference, he made an announcement.
[10:42]
Mike Chitwood
You know, this is absolutely out of control and it ends now.
[10:45]
John Woodrow Cox
In the same moment, his investigators were tracking down two more children, one 13 years old and the other 12.
[10:52]
Mike Chitwood
So we're going to start doing Monday is since parents, you don't want to raise your kids, I'm going to start raising them. Every time we make an arrest, your kid's photo is going to be put out there. And if I could do it, I'm going to perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid's up to.
[11:12]
John Woodrow Cox
On social media. His ultimatum was a hit. In the weeks ahead, children, parents, teachers, administrators and police officers all would wrestle with with what it meant in real life. A boy named Armando, who was 11, was sleeping with his tan baby blanket when his mom rubbed his shoulder until he opened his eyes. Just past 4am on September 16, she told him the police were at the door. He slid on sweatpants and waited in the living room of their Port Orange home while a team in black vests searched his room for guns. Body cam footage shows what happened next to the boy, who, with his mother's permission, the post is identifying only by his middle name. Armando, a bright, round faced kid who tends to lose his breath when he talks too fast, sat on the bed beside his mom and listened. The detectives who had worked the case through the night knew he had showed off his collection of knives and airsoft guns during a FaceTime call with three other kids that weekend. Detectives had already interviewed each of the children who disagreed on whether Armando claimed the guns were real or if he threatened to shoot up a school or if a, quote, hit list he had composed was a joke. He told the investigators in a voice that had yet to reach puberty, that he was, quote, pretty sure he'd mentioned to his friends that the guns were toys, but he figured they could spot the orange tips that indicate they're not real. Armando swore he didn't threaten to attack any schools. His mom, Jessica, asked about his hit list.
[12:58]
Hannah Natenson
Look at me. Did you say something like that?
[13:01]
Jessica
No, I swear to God I didn't.
[13:04]
Hannah Natenson
Did you write a list down?
[13:06]
Jessica
I didn't know.
[13:08]
Hannah Natenson
You didn't write a list down.
[13:10]
Jessica
I did, yes.
[13:13]
John Woodrow Cox
The detectives had already found a notebook with names jotted down in black marker. One of them asked, did you jump and say that it was a hit list or a kill list?
[13:24]
Jessica
I said it was. I jokingly said it was a hit list. Joking manner.
[13:29]
John Woodrow Cox
But then his mom interjected, does this look like a junk teal? I'm not sure if he told them or not. Twelve minutes later, one of the detectives told Armando that they would have to arrest him. The boy's mouth fell open, but no words came out. He slumped forward onto the bed and cried into a blanket. Later, in the kitchen, Armando, coughing and hyperventilating, placed his hands behind his back. His mom moaned, a hand covering her mouth as the handcuffs clicked shut. In a video released later that day, he steps from the back of an suv, his wrist still cuffed, a deputy says, as the boy quietly shuffles down the sidewalk, his white Nike Flip flop scraping the pavement. Inside the building, his ankles are shackled before he is ushered into an empty holding cell. All right, the man asks.
[14:53]
Hannah Natenson
Do you have any questions?
[15:06]
John Woodrow Cox
The video, posted by the Volusia Sheriff's office to YouTube and Instagram, has been viewed more than 170,000 times, and nearly all of the most liked comments praise the 6th graders. Public shaming on another day, on another campus, in another part of Volusia, another educator was reckoning with the same epidemic. Principal Jason Watson opened the email just before 1pm his heart beat loud in his ears. The message read, I will be going to Atlantic High School and shooting every cisgendered person I see with my dad's guns. In fact, I am already parked nearby in a red Honda Civic with some handguns. When this is all over, the entire country shall remember my name. There was no time to read it twice. The principal clicked a series of keys on his computer, placing Atlantic High into a hold wall. Alarms throughout campus flash purple, part of the security operation that cost the district $6.9 million per year. Alerts buzzed on computers and phones, telling students to stay inside their classrooms, asking teachers to close their doors and check the locks. Watson yanked the walkie talkie from his belt. He asked his crisis team, where are you guys? I got something. What unfolded that day now happens so often, it has become a part of the landscape of American education. Educators buy expensive alert technologies. They hire large staffs or even create departments devoted to security. They start the school year with assemblies, teaching students where and how to hide. It's putting a huge drain on school administrators who are already overloaded, said Kenneth Trump, president of the consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services. Inside Atlantic High, staff and students didn't know the threat was fake or that the person who made it would never get caught. April Travis paused her lesson on the principles of teaching. She looked out at the room of seniors who'd signed up for the class because they might want to become educators. What if this time, she thought, someone really had a gun? On the opposite side of campus, math teacher Caleb Rich crossed to his classroom door. As he pulled a black shade over the window, he pictured Atlantic's campus, its tall chain link fencing, its single entry point protected by a security guard, the heavy metal door against his palms. In her theater class, 17 year old Oriah Wallace put down her mechanical pencil. She mouthed the phrase she repeats during every lockdown Everybody is safe until we're told otherwise. And Senior Dominic Nash, 18, recalled all the times he'd seen Atlantic High lock its doors or halt class for threats, starting when he was a freshman and a boy showed up to campus with a pistol tucked in his pants. By this, his senior year, he knew exactly what to do when the wall alarms blazed. Different colors Purple, like today, meant stay where you are. Green meant evacuate. Red, a lockdown meant leave your desk and huddle beneath the shark sticker, a tiny version of the Atlantic mascot placed in the area of every classroom where students are most protected from gunfire. On his first day behind bars, Armando ate Goldfish crackers and learned that most of the other boys were there for stealing guns or beating people bloody. One teenager threatened to kill him, Armando said, but he didn't really mean it. Nearly all the other inmates were older than he was. To him, some of them looked like grown ups. In his cell at the Volusia Regional Juvenile Detention Center, Armando said he found Hail Satan written on the wall, a message he covered in toothpaste and toilet paper. When he noticed an upside down cross above the door, Armando, just over 5ft tall, stepped back and jumped, then kept jumping until he knocked it down. He placed the cross over his bed, right side up. Armando, who said he'd never thrown a punch or taken one, got slapped in the back of the neck by a cellmate who wanted to annoy him. Another teen peed in a soap bucket the boys all shared. Armando witnessed at least three fights, he said, and during one he caught a stray fist in the chest. Every day he sat on his bed and cried. Eventually, though, he learned how to get by, figuring that just being nice and existing was the best approach. He gave away milk and oatmeal and once, a brownie, hoping the generosity would help him make friends or at least avoid enemies. Other children ordered his cellmate to stop bothering him, he said, and the teen who threatened to kill him instead looked out for him, promising to leave Armando his bank of phone minutes if he got out first he learned how to shuffle cards and play spades, and he liked the guards who sometimes gave him Kit Kat bars when he volunteered to mop or pick up trash. One of them nicknamed him Dorito after mispronouncing his last name. That made him laugh. Each morning, an older teen who called himself a preacher prayed with Armando, and each night he talked to God alone. He asked, please keep me safe. By then, his arrest had made national news, drawing widespread praise online and comments that included, I support this 100%, get this thug out of here and don't ask them if they're all right, just book them. Experts in child psychology and criminology condemned Chetwood's approach. Deborah Weisbrot, a psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University and author of a 20 year study on students who make school threats, said, there's absolutely no evidence that this is going to be helpful in reducing the level of threats. I do think it's possible that could further humiliate and embarrass a child and they could go further underground in whatever the distress was that led them to make the threat in the first place. Chitwood anticipated blowback, but dismissed what little he heard. Profane and mustachioed, the 61 year old had long welcomed controversy. In 2023, he led a public campaign against white supremacists he frequently referred to as, quote, scumbags to critics of his approach with the accused children. He pointed to the precipitous drop in arrest after he began publicizing names and faces from five the week he started to perp walk the children to seven the week after that to two the week after that to one the week after that to zero the week after that. He said, I have to worry about.
[22:11]
Mike Chitwood
The 99% of students who are going to school to do the right thing. I have to worry about teachers, administrators and parents. Somebody else could worry about little Johnny or little Jandy. I cannot have schools and after school activities and parents and teachers running around in fear.
[22:27]
John Woodrow Cox
At Armando's home, his mom, Jessica, struggled to process what had happened. Along with his perp walk video, the sheriff's office had shared images of the array of airsoft guns he'd spent years collecting. Jessica resented that her son, an honor roll student not allowed to watch R rated movies, had been branded as a would be school shooter, potentially for life. She rejected the notion, popular among online commenters, that she was to blame or had given her son an irresponsible number of weapons. It was not illegal, she noted, for Armando to own the airsoft guns or plunk cans with them in the backyard. Several didn't fire anyway. They tried to make him out to be this little monster, she said of the sheriff's office. His treatment galled her, in large part because of an incident that had happened the year before. In late March 2023, according to an incident report, a teacher at his elementary school had found another kill list and the only name on it was Armando's. In that case, the report said, the sheriff's office determined the girl who made the list had no history of disciplinary issues and may not have understood what she had done. Case closed Jessica can't understand why the same sheriff's office treated two similar allegations so differently, chitwood said. What occurred this year has nothing to do with what happened the year before. This year it was out of control and we announced what we were going to do. They were all given a warning in the detention center. Armando knew nothing about the other case because his mom had never told him he'd been named on a supposed kill list. She wanted to preserve his innocence. As the days passed, Armando began to wonder how long he would remain there. He tried to ignore the kid who told him he'd never go free. One day, he said, a guard approached. You're on the tv, the man said. It had been two days since the video of Armando's arrests began to spread online, and the leaders of Volusia county schools had decided to leave no doubt for the rest of their students about what would happen if they, too, threatened a campus. Early on the afternoon of September 18, the principal at Taylor Middle High School in a rural swath of the county 25 miles from the beach, announced over the intercom. The teachers were about to play a clip of Chitwood from the recent news conference. The teens watched and listened as the sheriff delivered his ultimatums. Zero tolerance, felony charges, Faces on posters, arrests recorded and shared. Just then, the deputy assigned to the school, Christopher Newman, got a call from the sheriff's office. The FBI, which has spent millions to monitor social media for potential danger, had detected a threat against Taylor made minutes earlier by someone on campus. Newman radioed the principal, and the school was placed on a hold. The cell phone used to make the threat was traced to an address where four of Taylor's students lived. At the time, Newman said each was in a different classroom. He knew two of them. They were cousins, a boy and a girl. Newman decided to start with the boy rushing toward a distant red brick building where the 16 year old attended classes on his way. It struck him just how brazen these students had been a threat made against the school. At the school immediately after a warning about the consequences of threatening a school, he thought, good God, are you kidding me? In the boys classroom, he snatched his backpack and ordered him outside. Newman took the teen's phone. Imma shoot up the school, his cousin, the girl had joked on Snapchat, sending him an identical note in a direct message, his reply same. Newman left him with another deputy and headed across campus to retrieve his cousin. He unlocked the door to classroom 5115 and spotted the girl, who was 17, in the middle of the room. According to body cam footage, Newman knew her. She had anger issues and used to get in fights, but he'd seen her make progress. Newman sighed and gathered her bag.
[26:52]
Mike Chitwood
I need your computer too.
[26:57]
John Woodrow Cox
She stood and walked to the classroom door. Pausing next to a sign that read Dream Big, she placed her hands behind her back. She laughed. It's not you. This is not even the time to ever joke about that. Me and my cousin were texting by ourselves, she said.
[27:20]
Mike Chitwood
When you use words like I'm gonna shoot up the school, the FBI picks.
[27:23]
John Woodrow Cox
Up on that, he replied as she was led down the hallway. Newman, a school resource deputy for 18 years, had never wanted any other role in law enforcement. Bearded and broad chested, the father of four knew he could look intimidating. So Newman wore googly eyes on his body camera. The kids called him Depp. Nothing had changed the dynamic among students or the complexities of his work more than social media and the episode at Taylor reminded him yet again just how easily it could be weaponized to paralyze a campus. What motivates students to menace schools online is typically trivial A desire to impress classmates they like or frighten ones they don't. Or, in many cases, just to get a day off from classes. Only in the rarest cases do they intend to harm anyone. Robert Tressman, a psychiatry professor at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, said people will say things to a computer that they would never say directly to another person in front of them. Certainly teenagers and preteens act without really understanding the consequences of their behavior. Increasingly, though, law enforcement officials have more sophisticated tools to trace the threats and less willingness to let them go unpunished. Kenneth Trump, the school security expert, said, there is such frustration. People are frustrated about not being able to just stop these once and for all. So it becomes we're going to arrest everybody, whether they're 18 or they're nine. Much of that frustration, Newman understood, stemmed from the profound effect those threats could have on other students Days before the incident at Taylor, he'd responded to a lockdown at a middle school where someone reported seeing a gunman. There was none. But that news had not reached the boy, who burst out of a classroom so overcome with panic that it triggered an asthma attack. Now, as Newman sorted through what came next for the cousins, he worried how the upheaval they'd provoked would impact the thousand other students on campus. One of them, Jurnee Cope, was in science class when she heard that a girl had showed up to school with a gun and a list of kids. She didn't like the rumor about the gun and the list was not true, but the 13 year old didn't know that she froze at her desk because a week before, the girl had texted Journey, calling her, quote, fake. The angry texts turned into angry calls, and now Journey couldn't stop wondering if her name was was on the list. Journey had no space in her mind for science. She closed her eyes and put her head on the desk. Some days later, her mother called her over and hit play on a Facebook video posted by Chitwood. There was the girl she'd bickered with and a boy, her cousin, their hand shackled, stepping from the back of a van and trailing down the same path Armando had walked. In the video, the deputy asked the.
[30:24]
Mike Chitwood
Boy, think you made a wise decision today?
[30:26]
John Woodrow Cox
Think you made a wise decision today? The boy shook his head, bent over her mom's iPhone. Journey smiled. It felt good to watch. Armando returned home to a slip and slide party, a new dog named honey, and after 12 days behind bars, a mother convinced he shouldn't have served a single day. Another boy on the FaceTime call with him had since been arrested, accused of telling other children in a group chat that Armando planned to kill them. When detectives confronted him, the 11 year old acknowledged that he'd lied. He had wanted to scare people. His arrest didn't exonerate Armando, a spokesman for the sheriff's office said. Though Armando has always denied threatening to shoot up a school, he confirmed to detectives that he'd written a hit list as a joke. Now, four months later, Armando says he thinks the list was the other boy's idea. Whether the rest of the children encouraged him to go through with it, the spokesman said, did not matter. A prosecutor offered Armando a diversion program that would wipe the felony charge from his record with no admission of guilt if he completed community service, said his mom, Jessica. She considered going to trial, but an attorney told her he could face three years in a juvenile facility seven hours away. She couldn't bear the risk. Armando switched to homeschooling and tried to stay busy. He signed up for a flag football team with kids who didn't judge him. He discovered the Harry Potter movie series and became so infatuated that he started fashioning elaborate wands out of paper towels, glue and paint. He imagined joining the rodeo and moving to the country. I wish I was younger, I wish I was younger, he said, because he wanted to be the kid he used to be. A week after his release, his family took him to a seafood restaurant that overlooked the water. But he had to leave, convinced that everyone there knew who he was. He had a recurring nightmare imagining himself drowning in the hull of a ship. He refused to sleep in his own bed, instead spending each night on the couch next to his dog. He said, I didn't want to go.
[32:50]
Jessica
Back into the room because that's where I was last time. Pretty much right before I was arrested, that's where I was sleeping. And I just don't really want to make a mess. I'm scared something else bad is going to happen if I sleep in here.
[33:09]
John Woodrow Cox
He's pleaded with his mom and her fiance to move them away. He can't shake the fear that people in Volusia are disgusted by him, a fixation that led Armando to decide he would change his name. His mom didn't argue. She knew that the worst moment of her son's life had become a tale of caution for other children. For Tori Caspert, who also lives in Port Orange, the story was too unnerving to ignore. Before school one morning, she noticed a news segment about Armando on TV. We're watching this, Casper told her twin sons, both 13, who went to Creekside Middle with Armando. The boys, sprawled across her lap in their pajamas, sat up. They thought they recognized him, even with his face blurred in the clip, Caspert looked at her sons, both honor roll students. She couldn't imagine them wanting to shoot up a school. Then she looked at the TV. She would never have suspected an 11 year old, either. If you ever do a threat like this or anything like this, she recalled telling them, I will let Sheriff Chitwood come over here. I will let him do it to you, too. You understand me? Thirty miles southwest, another Volusia parent named Allen took a screenshot of a Facebook post about Armando's arrest, including the boy's mugshot, and texted it to his teenage sons. Allen wrote, just letting you know not to be stupid. No jokes. Allen, a middle school teacher, felt conflicted. All three of his children had been locked in their classrooms because of threats, and in his own school, he witnessed the panic and fear they could cause. Even so, he didn't support what the sheriff had done to Armando. I don't know if he was joking or not, alan said. But he's 11. The day after Armando's arrest, Alan tried to explain the stakes to his sons on the drive home from school. He was especially worried about his 16 year old, who is autistic and suffers from depression. During the past year, he'd been placed into protective custody four times. If they're going to do this to a little kid, a high school kid has got no chance, he recalled telling his boys in the car. We know they said. We're not dumb. One week later, deputies knocked on their door. His younger son, Alan learned, had gotten into a confrontation over a video game. The teen had posted a message in all caps to Instagram and Facebook, along with a stock image of a Glock quote. If people keep threatening me, I will do some keep trying me. I door you, the teen wrote, misspelling the word dare. As deputies led the teen away. Allen headed to his own bedroom, unlocked the closet door and opened the gun safe. He didn't know that his son would spend the next 15 days in the detention center. He didn't know that the sheriff would decide not to publicize the teen's identity because of his mental health problems. But he did know that parents often underestimated how desperate and dangerous to themselves or to others their children could be. Allen said, do I think my son would shoot up a school? No. Even if it's a 1% chance, I'm not going to risk it. So he packed up his guns and took them away. The next day, another threat spread through the county, this time from a person who claimed to be armed with several handguns. Another six Volusia campuses locked their doors. Another 300 teachers tried to keep teaching as if nothing was wrong. Another 5,000 students waited to find out if this time the threat was real. This story was reported and written by Hannah Natenson and me, John Woodrow Cox. Rosanne Niklowi also contributed to the reporting. Music and sound production by Bishop Sand.

Summary7 min read

Post Reports Podcast Summary: "Deep Reads: Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to jail."

Podcast Information:

Title: Post Reports
Host/Author: The Washington Post
Episode: Deep Reads: Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to jail.
Release Date: February 22, 2025

Introduction

In the February 22, 2025, episode of Post Reports, hosts Martine Powers and Elahe Izadi delve into a troubling phenomenon: the drastic spike in arrests of children making threats about school shootings following actual mass school shootings. This episode, part of the Deep Reads series, offers a comprehensive narrative investigation into how law enforcement's zero-tolerance policies are impacting young students, with a particular focus on Volusia County, Florida.

Background: Surge in School Threats Post-Shooting

The episode begins with an introduction by co-hosts John Woodrow Cox and Hannah Natenson, both seasoned reporters from The Washington Post, who have extensively covered school shootings and their repercussions.

Hannah Natenson shares her long-term engagement with reporting on school shootings, highlighting incidents ranging from a seven-year-old shooter in Virginia to a recent 14-year-old in Georgia.
John Woodrow Cox discusses his eight-year focus on narrative reporting concerning gun violence in schools, mentioning critical events like the Newtown, Uvalde, Parkland, and Las Vegas shootings.

The discussion transitions into their collaborative research, which revealed a stark increase in threats and subsequent arrests following major school shootings. Their investigation involved contacting nearly 250 of the nation’s largest school districts for data and reviewing 20,000 news articles to track reported arrests within two weeks of each shooting.

Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood’s Hardline Approach

The narrative zeroes in on Volusia County, Florida, where Sheriff Mike Chitwood implemented an unprecedented and controversial policy in response to the surge in school threats.

Perp Walking of Minors: Sheridan Chitwood began "perp walking" children as young as 11 who made threats on social media, a practice virtually unheard of, especially involving minors not convicted of any crime.

[10:42] Mike Chitwood: "You know, this is absolutely out of control and it ends now."
Public Shaming: Chitwood publicly released the names and faces of the arrested children, ensuring that their identities were disseminated widely on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. This method aimed to deter other children from making similar threats by instilling fear of public humiliation.

[10:51] Mike Chitwood: "So we're going to start doing Monday is since parents, you don't want to raise your kids, I'm going to start raising them. Every time we make an arrest, your kid's photo is going to be put out there. And if I could do it, I'm going to perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid's up to."

Chitwood justified his actions by emphasizing the need to protect the majority of students and maintain safety within schools. Despite anticipating backlash, Chitwood noted a significant decline in threat-related arrests following his policy implementation.

[22:10] Mike Chitwood: "The 99% of students who are going to school to do the right thing. I have to worry about teachers, administrators and parents. Somebody else could worry about little Johnny or little Jandy. I cannot have schools and after school activities and parents and teachers running around in fear."

Case Study: Armando’s Experience

A focal point of the episode is the harrowing story of Armando, an 11-year-old boy from Port Orange, Florida, who became a victim of Sheriff Chitwood’s policies.

Arrest and Detention: Armando was arrested for an Instagram post that was perceived as a threat to blow up his school. Despite claiming it was a joke and that his guns were airsoft toys, he was charged with a felony and detained for three weeks.

[11:11] John Woodrow Cox: "On social media. His ultimatum was a hit."

Armando’s detention experience was traumatic. He faced bullying, fear, and isolation within the juvenile detention center. The public shaming video of his arrest garnered over 170,000 views, with the majority of comments condemning him.

Jessica (Armando’s Mother): "He [Armando] was branded as a would-be school shooter, potentially for life."

Impact on Personal Life: Post-release, Armando struggled with nightmares, fear of public spaces, and trauma from being labeled a threat. His family sought a diversion program to erase his felony charge, allowing him to resume a semblance of normalcy through homeschooling and extracurricular activities like flag football.

Armando: "I wish I was younger, I wish I was younger, because I wanted to be the kid I used to be."

Community and Expert Reactions

The episode explores the broader community response and expert opinions regarding Sheriff Chitwood's approach.

Parental Concern: Parents like Jessica and Allen expressed frustration and fear over the inconsistent treatment of their children. While Chitwood aggressively pursued arrests, some parents had previous encounters where similar threats were dismissed or handled with more leniency.

Allen (Middle School Teacher and Parent): "Do I think my son would shoot up a school? No. Even if it's a 1% chance, I'm not going to risk it."
Educational Impact: Educators faced immense pressure to implement stringent security measures, often at significant financial costs. The psychological toll on teachers and students was evident, with constant lockdowns and heightened anxiety becoming the new norm in schools.

Kenneth Trump (School Security Expert): "There is such frustration. People are frustrated about not being able to just stop these once and for all. So it becomes we're going to arrest everybody, whether they're 18 or they're nine."
Expert Critique: Child psychologists and criminologists criticized Chitwood’s methods, arguing that public shaming and harsh punishments could exacerbate the underlying issues leading to threats, rather than address them constructively.

Deborah Weisbrot (Psychiatry Professor): "There's absolutely no evidence that this is going to be helpful in reducing the level of threats. I do think it's possible that could further humiliate and embarrass a child and they could go further underground in whatever the distress was that led them to make the threat in the first place."

Impact on Students and Schools

The pervasive fear and insecurity instilled by Chitwood’s policies had profound effects on the student body and school environment across Volusia County.

Student Trauma: Students endured constant fear of lockdowns, genuine or false threats, and the potential for sudden arrests of their peers. This environment hindered their ability to learn and socialize normally.

Oriah Wallace (17, Theater Student): "Everybody is safe until we're told otherwise."
Altered School Dynamics: Schools invested heavily in security technologies and protocols, often prioritizing these measures over educational and emotional support for students. The recurring incidents of threats, whether serious or not, created a climate of perpetual tension.
Example of Taylor Middle High School: The episode recounts an incident where a threat led to immediate lockdowns, re-emphasizing the constant state of alert that schools operate under, contributing to student anxiety and disrupted learning experiences.

Chief Christopher Newman (School Resource Deputy): "When you use words like I'm gonna shoot up the school, the FBI picks."

Conclusions and Insights

Post Reports highlights the unintended consequences of aggressive law enforcement tactics in response to school threats. While the intention behind Sheriff Chitwood's policies was to enhance safety, the approach resulted in severe emotional and psychological distress for students, strained relationships between law enforcement and the community, and questioned the efficacy of public shaming as a deterrent.

The episode underscores the need for balanced strategies that prioritize mental health support, constructive interventions, and community engagement over punitive measures. Experts advocate for evidence-based approaches that address the root causes of such threats, suggesting that fear-driven policies may not only fail to prevent violence but also harm innocent children in the process.

Notable Quotes:

Mike Chitwood [10:51]: "We're going to perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid's up to."
John Woodrow Cox [11:11]: "In the same moment, his investigators were tracking down two more children, one 13 years old and the other 12."
Armando [32:50]: "I wish I was younger, I wish I was younger, because I wanted to be the kid I used to be."
Deborah Weisbrot [22:14]: "There is absolutely no evidence that this is going to be helpful in reducing the level of threats."
Kenneth Trump [21:00]: "We're going to arrest everybody, whether they're 18 or they're nine."

Attribution:

This summary is based on a transcript from the Post Reports podcast episode "Deep Reads: Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to jail." reported by Hannah Natenson and John Woodrow Cox, with contributions from Rosanne Niklowi, and sound production by Bishop Sand.

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Transcript48 lines

[00:07]
John Woodrow Cox
Hi, Hannah.
[00:08]
Hannah Natenson
Hi, John.
[00:09]
John Woodrow Cox
Why don't we introduce ourselves?
[00:11]
Hannah Natenson
Sure. I'm Hannah Natenson and I cover education for the Washington Post. And pretty much since I've started, I've had to write about school shootings. From a seven year old who shot his teacher in Virginia to this past fall when a 14 year old shot two classmates and two teachers in Georgia.
[00:29]
John Woodrow Cox
Yeah. My name is John Woodrow Cox. I'm an enterprise reporter at the Washington Post. I have a focus on narrative reporting. I have reported on school shootings and gun violence, how it affects children for the past eight years. I wrote a book about this subject, wrote about a school shooting in South Carolina, wrote about the Newtown school shooting, Uvalde, Parkland. I wrote about the mass shooting in Las Vegas. So, you know, this has been a big part of my life and the work that Hannah and I have done together for a long time.
[01:03]
Hannah Natenson
I don't normally ask John to tell me all his work because I, I have been an avid follower of John's work since college. I would read John's pieces and it made me want to go into journalism and especially want to come work at the Washington Post for the kind of narrative work that he always did and still does.
[01:22]
John Woodrow Cox
Oh, that's very kind. Although Hannah is already better than I am, so that's not.
[01:27]
Hannah Natenson
That's fake news.
[01:28]
John Woodrow Cox
Which is why we're, which is why we work together. Now. I don't have to. I don't have to try as hard. So we wrote this story that you will hear in a moment, and it's part of our Deep Reads series, which showcases narrative journalism here at the Post. The story is about the ripple effects of the huge number of threats that explode across the country after school shootings and in this specific case, how that phenomenon played out in one community. So our reporting for this started actually on another story where Hannah and I worked together very closely last year after the Apalachee shooting in Georgia, a case in which a freshman killed two students and two teachers. And one thing we noticed in the weeks right after that shooting was this. Just a huge number of threats that were being made against other schools. And a lot of kids were being arrested for making threats, mostly on social media. So, Hannah, if you want to talk a little bit about how we launched into trying to quantify that.
[02:39]
Hannah Natenson
So we sort of went about it in two ways. One thing is we went to some of the nation's largest school districts. I think we contacted close to 250 of them and we asked them for data on the number of threats they Got in the two weeks that followed the last four really deadly school shootings, from Apalachi this past year to the Oxford shooting in Michigan in 2021. And so we had all these districts that we sought records from, seeing how many threats came in. And then we also, John and I together read through 20,000 news articles to try to track how many arrests happened that were reported in the two weeks after each of these shootings.
[03:21]
John Woodrow Cox
Yeah, and that was a major undertaking. But what really struck us was there were more threats, but there was a disproportionate increase in arrests. So obviously we had this big idea, we had all this data, it was national, but it was hard to sort of wrap your mind around, I think, as a reader, to say, well, what does this mean? What does this look like? What's context here? So we thought the way to tell this story is through one place. So we came across this case in Volusia County, Florida, where the sheriff there was so fed up that he was actually perp walking children as young as 11 years old.
[04:03]
Hannah Natenson
And just for people who don't know what perp walking is, it's when law enforcement takes someone they're taking into detention or arrest and they release their name publicly, maybe have them walk along and be filmed. So it's a very public outing. And sheriffs, after this shooting and all these threats were doing this to children.
[04:21]
John Woodrow Cox
Yeah. And that's extremely rare. I mean, it's virtually unheard of that you would take somebody who's 11, certainly, or 12 or 13, and publicized their name, their face, you know, put it out there for the world because they've not been convicted of any crime. So this person is being labeled with whatever you've accused them of forever. So Hannah and I went there to talk to the sheriff, to talk to a school resource officer, to talk to a principal at a school, to talk to some of the students who'd been arrested and outed and perp walked and who had spent, know, in some cases, three weeks in. In jail. I think every single person we talked to in this story felt like their perspective had been overlooked. Every single one of them.
[05:05]
Hannah Natenson
And I just want to say one thing that John has always done so well and that made me admire his work in the first place, is he always talks to the children, the actual children going to school. And so we made sure to do that here. Both the children who were arrested for making the threats and the kids who were in school when the threat came in and were terrified, even though it wasn't real, but they didn't know that.
[05:26]
John Woodrow Cox
You know, it's really important to me that readers understand their perspective from their perspective, not from everybody else. So, you know, I've always found it maybe to be easier to talk to kids than people might assume. They have a lot to say. They have opinions. Even at very, very young ages, they have very clear perspectives on whatever it is that they've gone through. So I try to be very frank with what it is that I'm doing, who I am. I explain to the kid who I am, what I do. I'll show them articles on my phone, I'll show them my profile page with my photo. And then I just tell them why I'm there. And I really just try to get them talking sort of generally. I also tell them that I'm not in charge. Every adult in their life is in charge of them. I'm not in charge. I'm not an authority figure. If they don't want to answer something, they don't have to. And I tell them that over and over and over again. When I went to Uvalde to write about the children who were killed there, my very first night there, I met a little girl who had been across the hallway from the two classrooms where all of her friends were killed. She could hear her best friend dying. And I went there a little less than a month after the shooting. And I met her on the very first night I'm in town. And it was really just for her to get to know me and for her family to get comfortable with me. And within 30 minutes of having met her, she launched into a retelling of that day in great specificity, really detailed. I mean, you know, she told me about hearing her friend's scream. She could recognize her voice. And I paused her at one point and said, just so you know, we don't have to talk about this now, we can wait. And she said, no, I want to talk about it now. So that when I talk about, you know, giving children agency when putting them in charge, that's what that means. Like, it wasn't my job to tell her this is too soon for us to talk about it. It was just to say, you lead the way. And I think that's Hannah and I very much took that approach in this story is just explaining why it is that we're there. And I think we would both attest to this, that we are often the first people in these kids lives who they are totally willing to open up to.
[07:37]
Hannah Natenson
And that was true here for sure, I would say. So we reported this story over four months seeking all this data from school districts.
[07:49]
John Woodrow Cox
And then we spent a little less than a week down in Florida doing the reporting there in Volusia. It was a very, very, very quick trip and just sort of it all came together.
[07:59]
Hannah Natenson
So I think I was there Monday to Friday.
[08:02]
John Woodrow Cox
Really? Yeah, I just know. I just. It was so strikingly.
[08:05]
Hannah Natenson
It was short. It was short.
[08:06]
John Woodrow Cox
It was so strikingly short. This is the sort of story that I think you'd think like we embedded for like two weeks in this place. But like everybody was cooperative.
[08:22]
Hannah Natenson
Okay, here's our story called. Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to J.
[08:39]
John Woodrow Cox
The Dragnet first snagged a girl named Lori who was lying in bed amid her stuffed unicorns and hello Kitty dolls. When the ninth grader had what she thought was a funny idea, she opened Instagram and over a hot pink background began to type, blowing the SKL up TMR. Blowing the school up tomorrow. It was September 10th, six days after another 14 year old was accused of gunning down two students and a pair of teachers at Apalachee High in Georgia. At Lori's home in Florida, she posted the message and forgot about it until a few hours later when a friend urged her to delete what she'd written. It was too late, of course, because the Internet is forever. And because unbeknownst to Laurie and hundreds of other kids, law enforcement's tolerance for threats of any kind made anywhere by anyone was nearing zero. The next day, the girl was placed in handcuffs that barely fit her wrists, charged with a felony, and taken to a Volusia county detention center for three weeks. The day after that, another 14 year old was charged for a comment on Instagram that read, if y'all crybabies don't shut up, I'm gonna shoot up your school. The day after that, a 13 year old was charged for a post on TikTok that read, I will be shooting up Heritage middle school on 9, 1324. More threats would rapidly follow in Volusia county and across the country, as if a pathogen had been set loose. An analysis of news reports by the Washington Post found that at least 477 people, 90% of them students, were arrested in the two weeks after the Georgia massacre. That's nearly 100 more than in the aftermath of the three previous mass school shootings combined. Volusia's elected sheriff Mike Chitwood, a registered independent and brash Philadelphia native, decided he had had enough. In the past week, he deployed dozens of deputies and spent an extra $21,000 in taxpayer money. On the previous night alone, his Office had received 54 tips. At a news conference, he made an announcement.
[10:42]
Mike Chitwood
You know, this is absolutely out of control and it ends now.
[10:45]
John Woodrow Cox
In the same moment, his investigators were tracking down two more children, one 13 years old and the other 12.
[10:52]
Mike Chitwood
So we're going to start doing Monday is since parents, you don't want to raise your kids, I'm going to start raising them. Every time we make an arrest, your kid's photo is going to be put out there. And if I could do it, I'm going to perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid's up to.
[11:12]
John Woodrow Cox
On social media. His ultimatum was a hit. In the weeks ahead, children, parents, teachers, administrators and police officers all would wrestle with with what it meant in real life. A boy named Armando, who was 11, was sleeping with his tan baby blanket when his mom rubbed his shoulder until he opened his eyes. Just past 4am on September 16, she told him the police were at the door. He slid on sweatpants and waited in the living room of their Port Orange home while a team in black vests searched his room for guns. Body cam footage shows what happened next to the boy, who, with his mother's permission, the post is identifying only by his middle name. Armando, a bright, round faced kid who tends to lose his breath when he talks too fast, sat on the bed beside his mom and listened. The detectives who had worked the case through the night knew he had showed off his collection of knives and airsoft guns during a FaceTime call with three other kids that weekend. Detectives had already interviewed each of the children who disagreed on whether Armando claimed the guns were real or if he threatened to shoot up a school or if a, quote, hit list he had composed was a joke. He told the investigators in a voice that had yet to reach puberty, that he was, quote, pretty sure he'd mentioned to his friends that the guns were toys, but he figured they could spot the orange tips that indicate they're not real. Armando swore he didn't threaten to attack any schools. His mom, Jessica, asked about his hit list.
[12:58]
Hannah Natenson
Look at me. Did you say something like that?
[13:01]
Jessica
No, I swear to God I didn't.
[13:04]
Hannah Natenson
Did you write a list down?
[13:06]
Jessica
I didn't know.
[13:08]
Hannah Natenson
You didn't write a list down.
[13:10]
Jessica
I did, yes.
[13:13]
John Woodrow Cox
The detectives had already found a notebook with names jotted down in black marker. One of them asked, did you jump and say that it was a hit list or a kill list?
[13:24]
Jessica
I said it was. I jokingly said it was a hit list. Joking manner.
[13:29]
John Woodrow Cox
But then his mom interjected, does this look like a junk teal? I'm not sure if he told them or not. Twelve minutes later, one of the detectives told Armando that they would have to arrest him. The boy's mouth fell open, but no words came out. He slumped forward onto the bed and cried into a blanket. Later, in the kitchen, Armando, coughing and hyperventilating, placed his hands behind his back. His mom moaned, a hand covering her mouth as the handcuffs clicked shut. In a video released later that day, he steps from the back of an suv, his wrist still cuffed, a deputy says, as the boy quietly shuffles down the sidewalk, his white Nike Flip flop scraping the pavement. Inside the building, his ankles are shackled before he is ushered into an empty holding cell. All right, the man asks.
[14:53]
Hannah Natenson
Do you have any questions?
[15:06]
John Woodrow Cox
The video, posted by the Volusia Sheriff's office to YouTube and Instagram, has been viewed more than 170,000 times, and nearly all of the most liked comments praise the 6th graders. Public shaming on another day, on another campus, in another part of Volusia, another educator was reckoning with the same epidemic. Principal Jason Watson opened the email just before 1pm his heart beat loud in his ears. The message read, I will be going to Atlantic High School and shooting every cisgendered person I see with my dad's guns. In fact, I am already parked nearby in a red Honda Civic with some handguns. When this is all over, the entire country shall remember my name. There was no time to read it twice. The principal clicked a series of keys on his computer, placing Atlantic High into a hold wall. Alarms throughout campus flash purple, part of the security operation that cost the district $6.9 million per year. Alerts buzzed on computers and phones, telling students to stay inside their classrooms, asking teachers to close their doors and check the locks. Watson yanked the walkie talkie from his belt. He asked his crisis team, where are you guys? I got something. What unfolded that day now happens so often, it has become a part of the landscape of American education. Educators buy expensive alert technologies. They hire large staffs or even create departments devoted to security. They start the school year with assemblies, teaching students where and how to hide. It's putting a huge drain on school administrators who are already overloaded, said Kenneth Trump, president of the consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services. Inside Atlantic High, staff and students didn't know the threat was fake or that the person who made it would never get caught. April Travis paused her lesson on the principles of teaching. She looked out at the room of seniors who'd signed up for the class because they might want to become educators. What if this time, she thought, someone really had a gun? On the opposite side of campus, math teacher Caleb Rich crossed to his classroom door. As he pulled a black shade over the window, he pictured Atlantic's campus, its tall chain link fencing, its single entry point protected by a security guard, the heavy metal door against his palms. In her theater class, 17 year old Oriah Wallace put down her mechanical pencil. She mouthed the phrase she repeats during every lockdown Everybody is safe until we're told otherwise. And Senior Dominic Nash, 18, recalled all the times he'd seen Atlantic High lock its doors or halt class for threats, starting when he was a freshman and a boy showed up to campus with a pistol tucked in his pants. By this, his senior year, he knew exactly what to do when the wall alarms blazed. Different colors Purple, like today, meant stay where you are. Green meant evacuate. Red, a lockdown meant leave your desk and huddle beneath the shark sticker, a tiny version of the Atlantic mascot placed in the area of every classroom where students are most protected from gunfire. On his first day behind bars, Armando ate Goldfish crackers and learned that most of the other boys were there for stealing guns or beating people bloody. One teenager threatened to kill him, Armando said, but he didn't really mean it. Nearly all the other inmates were older than he was. To him, some of them looked like grown ups. In his cell at the Volusia Regional Juvenile Detention Center, Armando said he found Hail Satan written on the wall, a message he covered in toothpaste and toilet paper. When he noticed an upside down cross above the door, Armando, just over 5ft tall, stepped back and jumped, then kept jumping until he knocked it down. He placed the cross over his bed, right side up. Armando, who said he'd never thrown a punch or taken one, got slapped in the back of the neck by a cellmate who wanted to annoy him. Another teen peed in a soap bucket the boys all shared. Armando witnessed at least three fights, he said, and during one he caught a stray fist in the chest. Every day he sat on his bed and cried. Eventually, though, he learned how to get by, figuring that just being nice and existing was the best approach. He gave away milk and oatmeal and once, a brownie, hoping the generosity would help him make friends or at least avoid enemies. Other children ordered his cellmate to stop bothering him, he said, and the teen who threatened to kill him instead looked out for him, promising to leave Armando his bank of phone minutes if he got out first he learned how to shuffle cards and play spades, and he liked the guards who sometimes gave him Kit Kat bars when he volunteered to mop or pick up trash. One of them nicknamed him Dorito after mispronouncing his last name. That made him laugh. Each morning, an older teen who called himself a preacher prayed with Armando, and each night he talked to God alone. He asked, please keep me safe. By then, his arrest had made national news, drawing widespread praise online and comments that included, I support this 100%, get this thug out of here and don't ask them if they're all right, just book them. Experts in child psychology and criminology condemned Chetwood's approach. Deborah Weisbrot, a psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University and author of a 20 year study on students who make school threats, said, there's absolutely no evidence that this is going to be helpful in reducing the level of threats. I do think it's possible that could further humiliate and embarrass a child and they could go further underground in whatever the distress was that led them to make the threat in the first place. Chitwood anticipated blowback, but dismissed what little he heard. Profane and mustachioed, the 61 year old had long welcomed controversy. In 2023, he led a public campaign against white supremacists he frequently referred to as, quote, scumbags to critics of his approach with the accused children. He pointed to the precipitous drop in arrest after he began publicizing names and faces from five the week he started to perp walk the children to seven the week after that to two the week after that to one the week after that to zero the week after that. He said, I have to worry about.
[22:11]
Mike Chitwood
The 99% of students who are going to school to do the right thing. I have to worry about teachers, administrators and parents. Somebody else could worry about little Johnny or little Jandy. I cannot have schools and after school activities and parents and teachers running around in fear.
[22:27]
John Woodrow Cox
At Armando's home, his mom, Jessica, struggled to process what had happened. Along with his perp walk video, the sheriff's office had shared images of the array of airsoft guns he'd spent years collecting. Jessica resented that her son, an honor roll student not allowed to watch R rated movies, had been branded as a would be school shooter, potentially for life. She rejected the notion, popular among online commenters, that she was to blame or had given her son an irresponsible number of weapons. It was not illegal, she noted, for Armando to own the airsoft guns or plunk cans with them in the backyard. Several didn't fire anyway. They tried to make him out to be this little monster, she said of the sheriff's office. His treatment galled her, in large part because of an incident that had happened the year before. In late March 2023, according to an incident report, a teacher at his elementary school had found another kill list and the only name on it was Armando's. In that case, the report said, the sheriff's office determined the girl who made the list had no history of disciplinary issues and may not have understood what she had done. Case closed Jessica can't understand why the same sheriff's office treated two similar allegations so differently, chitwood said. What occurred this year has nothing to do with what happened the year before. This year it was out of control and we announced what we were going to do. They were all given a warning in the detention center. Armando knew nothing about the other case because his mom had never told him he'd been named on a supposed kill list. She wanted to preserve his innocence. As the days passed, Armando began to wonder how long he would remain there. He tried to ignore the kid who told him he'd never go free. One day, he said, a guard approached. You're on the tv, the man said. It had been two days since the video of Armando's arrests began to spread online, and the leaders of Volusia county schools had decided to leave no doubt for the rest of their students about what would happen if they, too, threatened a campus. Early on the afternoon of September 18, the principal at Taylor Middle High School in a rural swath of the county 25 miles from the beach, announced over the intercom. The teachers were about to play a clip of Chitwood from the recent news conference. The teens watched and listened as the sheriff delivered his ultimatums. Zero tolerance, felony charges, Faces on posters, arrests recorded and shared. Just then, the deputy assigned to the school, Christopher Newman, got a call from the sheriff's office. The FBI, which has spent millions to monitor social media for potential danger, had detected a threat against Taylor made minutes earlier by someone on campus. Newman radioed the principal, and the school was placed on a hold. The cell phone used to make the threat was traced to an address where four of Taylor's students lived. At the time, Newman said each was in a different classroom. He knew two of them. They were cousins, a boy and a girl. Newman decided to start with the boy rushing toward a distant red brick building where the 16 year old attended classes on his way. It struck him just how brazen these students had been a threat made against the school. At the school immediately after a warning about the consequences of threatening a school, he thought, good God, are you kidding me? In the boys classroom, he snatched his backpack and ordered him outside. Newman took the teen's phone. Imma shoot up the school, his cousin, the girl had joked on Snapchat, sending him an identical note in a direct message, his reply same. Newman left him with another deputy and headed across campus to retrieve his cousin. He unlocked the door to classroom 5115 and spotted the girl, who was 17, in the middle of the room. According to body cam footage, Newman knew her. She had anger issues and used to get in fights, but he'd seen her make progress. Newman sighed and gathered her bag.
[26:52]
Mike Chitwood
I need your computer too.
[26:57]
John Woodrow Cox
She stood and walked to the classroom door. Pausing next to a sign that read Dream Big, she placed her hands behind her back. She laughed. It's not you. This is not even the time to ever joke about that. Me and my cousin were texting by ourselves, she said.
[27:20]
Mike Chitwood
When you use words like I'm gonna shoot up the school, the FBI picks.
[27:23]
John Woodrow Cox
Up on that, he replied as she was led down the hallway. Newman, a school resource deputy for 18 years, had never wanted any other role in law enforcement. Bearded and broad chested, the father of four knew he could look intimidating. So Newman wore googly eyes on his body camera. The kids called him Depp. Nothing had changed the dynamic among students or the complexities of his work more than social media and the episode at Taylor reminded him yet again just how easily it could be weaponized to paralyze a campus. What motivates students to menace schools online is typically trivial A desire to impress classmates they like or frighten ones they don't. Or, in many cases, just to get a day off from classes. Only in the rarest cases do they intend to harm anyone. Robert Tressman, a psychiatry professor at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, said people will say things to a computer that they would never say directly to another person in front of them. Certainly teenagers and preteens act without really understanding the consequences of their behavior. Increasingly, though, law enforcement officials have more sophisticated tools to trace the threats and less willingness to let them go unpunished. Kenneth Trump, the school security expert, said, there is such frustration. People are frustrated about not being able to just stop these once and for all. So it becomes we're going to arrest everybody, whether they're 18 or they're nine. Much of that frustration, Newman understood, stemmed from the profound effect those threats could have on other students Days before the incident at Taylor, he'd responded to a lockdown at a middle school where someone reported seeing a gunman. There was none. But that news had not reached the boy, who burst out of a classroom so overcome with panic that it triggered an asthma attack. Now, as Newman sorted through what came next for the cousins, he worried how the upheaval they'd provoked would impact the thousand other students on campus. One of them, Jurnee Cope, was in science class when she heard that a girl had showed up to school with a gun and a list of kids. She didn't like the rumor about the gun and the list was not true, but the 13 year old didn't know that she froze at her desk because a week before, the girl had texted Journey, calling her, quote, fake. The angry texts turned into angry calls, and now Journey couldn't stop wondering if her name was was on the list. Journey had no space in her mind for science. She closed her eyes and put her head on the desk. Some days later, her mother called her over and hit play on a Facebook video posted by Chitwood. There was the girl she'd bickered with and a boy, her cousin, their hand shackled, stepping from the back of a van and trailing down the same path Armando had walked. In the video, the deputy asked the.
[30:24]
Mike Chitwood
Boy, think you made a wise decision today?
[30:26]
John Woodrow Cox
Think you made a wise decision today? The boy shook his head, bent over her mom's iPhone. Journey smiled. It felt good to watch. Armando returned home to a slip and slide party, a new dog named honey, and after 12 days behind bars, a mother convinced he shouldn't have served a single day. Another boy on the FaceTime call with him had since been arrested, accused of telling other children in a group chat that Armando planned to kill them. When detectives confronted him, the 11 year old acknowledged that he'd lied. He had wanted to scare people. His arrest didn't exonerate Armando, a spokesman for the sheriff's office said. Though Armando has always denied threatening to shoot up a school, he confirmed to detectives that he'd written a hit list as a joke. Now, four months later, Armando says he thinks the list was the other boy's idea. Whether the rest of the children encouraged him to go through with it, the spokesman said, did not matter. A prosecutor offered Armando a diversion program that would wipe the felony charge from his record with no admission of guilt if he completed community service, said his mom, Jessica. She considered going to trial, but an attorney told her he could face three years in a juvenile facility seven hours away. She couldn't bear the risk. Armando switched to homeschooling and tried to stay busy. He signed up for a flag football team with kids who didn't judge him. He discovered the Harry Potter movie series and became so infatuated that he started fashioning elaborate wands out of paper towels, glue and paint. He imagined joining the rodeo and moving to the country. I wish I was younger, I wish I was younger, he said, because he wanted to be the kid he used to be. A week after his release, his family took him to a seafood restaurant that overlooked the water. But he had to leave, convinced that everyone there knew who he was. He had a recurring nightmare imagining himself drowning in the hull of a ship. He refused to sleep in his own bed, instead spending each night on the couch next to his dog. He said, I didn't want to go.
[32:50]
Jessica
Back into the room because that's where I was last time. Pretty much right before I was arrested, that's where I was sleeping. And I just don't really want to make a mess. I'm scared something else bad is going to happen if I sleep in here.
[33:09]
John Woodrow Cox
He's pleaded with his mom and her fiance to move them away. He can't shake the fear that people in Volusia are disgusted by him, a fixation that led Armando to decide he would change his name. His mom didn't argue. She knew that the worst moment of her son's life had become a tale of caution for other children. For Tori Caspert, who also lives in Port Orange, the story was too unnerving to ignore. Before school one morning, she noticed a news segment about Armando on TV. We're watching this, Casper told her twin sons, both 13, who went to Creekside Middle with Armando. The boys, sprawled across her lap in their pajamas, sat up. They thought they recognized him, even with his face blurred in the clip, Caspert looked at her sons, both honor roll students. She couldn't imagine them wanting to shoot up a school. Then she looked at the TV. She would never have suspected an 11 year old, either. If you ever do a threat like this or anything like this, she recalled telling them, I will let Sheriff Chitwood come over here. I will let him do it to you, too. You understand me? Thirty miles southwest, another Volusia parent named Allen took a screenshot of a Facebook post about Armando's arrest, including the boy's mugshot, and texted it to his teenage sons. Allen wrote, just letting you know not to be stupid. No jokes. Allen, a middle school teacher, felt conflicted. All three of his children had been locked in their classrooms because of threats, and in his own school, he witnessed the panic and fear they could cause. Even so, he didn't support what the sheriff had done to Armando. I don't know if he was joking or not, alan said. But he's 11. The day after Armando's arrest, Alan tried to explain the stakes to his sons on the drive home from school. He was especially worried about his 16 year old, who is autistic and suffers from depression. During the past year, he'd been placed into protective custody four times. If they're going to do this to a little kid, a high school kid has got no chance, he recalled telling his boys in the car. We know they said. We're not dumb. One week later, deputies knocked on their door. His younger son, Alan learned, had gotten into a confrontation over a video game. The teen had posted a message in all caps to Instagram and Facebook, along with a stock image of a Glock quote. If people keep threatening me, I will do some keep trying me. I door you, the teen wrote, misspelling the word dare. As deputies led the teen away. Allen headed to his own bedroom, unlocked the closet door and opened the gun safe. He didn't know that his son would spend the next 15 days in the detention center. He didn't know that the sheriff would decide not to publicize the teen's identity because of his mental health problems. But he did know that parents often underestimated how desperate and dangerous to themselves or to others their children could be. Allen said, do I think my son would shoot up a school? No. Even if it's a 1% chance, I'm not going to risk it. So he packed up his guns and took them away. The next day, another threat spread through the county, this time from a person who claimed to be armed with several handguns. Another six Volusia campuses locked their doors. Another 300 teachers tried to keep teaching as if nothing was wrong. Another 5,000 students waited to find out if this time the threat was real. This story was reported and written by Hannah Natenson and me, John Woodrow Cox. Rosanne Niklowi also contributed to the reporting. Music and sound production by Bishop Sand.