A Dunnellon Middle School student was arrested Thursday night after sending out an Instagram post stating that he felt like “shooting up the school.”
A teacher at the school called a Marion County sheriff’s deputy for help after another student told her about the social media post. The student told the teacher that the seventh-grader who sent out the post “does commonly talk about guns and seems to have an interest in them,” a sheriff’s office report states.
After viewing the Instagram message and looking at the boy’s profile on the social media site, the deputy went to his house and spoke with the seventh-grader and his father. The boy initially denied sending out the message but when asked by the deputy if he was “joking” and “did not actually mean what was said,” he shook his head yes, the report says.
The boy’s father then told him not to lie to the deputy and when asked again if he sent out the message saying he wanted to shoot up the school, the boy said he did, but offered no reason for doing so, the report says, adding that the boy was then arrested and transported to juvenile booking.