http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/04/5987347-teens-arrested-over-bizarre-facebook-death-plot

Quote :

We may sometimes whine about the weird stuff that happens because of Facebook, but — unlike one very unfortunate middle schooler — we have at least never found ourselves scared for our lives because of the social networking site. After all, a few pokes can't kill, right?

The Smoking Gun reports that four teenagers were recently arrested for posting a series of threatening Facebook messages after they suspected a young man of being the "snitch" who got their friend, 13-year-old Nicholas Gonzalez, caught in possession of a firearm at school. Yes, middle schools are getting to be a scary place these days.

The teenagers were arrested and charged with aggravated stalking after the threatened boy's mother shared concerns with authorities. Officers were quick to subpoena Facebook, which almost instantly provided them with the identities and locations of the individuals involved the bizarre and frightening exchange of Facebook messages that brought the whole mess to light.

It's difficult to imagine how Nicole Cruz, Amber Fredrick (listed as "Amber Love" in the police statement), Hope Williams, and Camren Monroe could possibly have thought that it'd be wise to post what equates to a death plot on such a semi-public medium, but here's what they wound up writing anyway:

Nicole Cruz: Feels like my life is falling apart...my best friend is in jail...and I feel as if I'm losing the love of my life. My life is going to hell so @!$%# it. Let me fall to pieces...i've lost the feeling to care anymore...i'm so numb.

Nicole Cruz: Found out who Nick's snitch is...[REDACTED]

Amber Love: Boo boo I need u to show me who that [REDACTED] kid is so I can kick he ass.

Nicole Cruz: Alrighty, will o. He @!$%#ing ruined my bestfriend's life! And ima end his!!

Amber Love: Oh that little bitch is dead. Just u have to show me who he is first then he is dead.

Hope WIlliams: IMA HELP KILL HIM!! THAT PUNK RUINED OUR LIVES!! HES SOO DEAD!!

Camren Monroe: Me and Hope can. Who the @!$%# is the prick?

Amber Love: idk who he is

Camren Monroe: Sounds like a [REDACTED] grader

Nicole Cruz: He's in [REDACTED] and I can put an end to that mother @!$%#ers life!

Camren Monroe: Ima kill his ass

If that's not already enough to make you scared of any nearby 13- and 14-year-old, then consider this: The boy they were threatening to kill was not involved at all in the investigation that led to the arrest of Nicholas Gonzalez. The lesson? Facebook might not kill you, but rumors posted there certainly might.

Now, this story in itself is not what's disturbing me so much. There are 4 pages of comments responding to this story, and most of them are broken up into 2 groups:

1. Everybody's overreacting, this is just kids being kids, it's what they've always done, it's what EVERY teenager does, typical teenage melodrama.

2. Parents can't discipline their kids or they go to jail, the kids aren't scared of their parents, so there's nothing the parents can do.


Okay, my question for anybody who thinks like 1.: how many people were YOU threatening to kill when you were a kid? How many friends did you have who brought guns to school and THAT was okay but if somebody told the police, THAT was going too far?

And for anybody who thinks like 2.: So that's the answer, kids won't behave so why should parents bother trying? If a kid flunks a math test is the logical answer 'well he didn't get it so let's just forget about it altogether'? No, you have him do it again until you see better results.

Apparently some people think parenting is a one time thing that if they don't listen to you once, you shouldn't bother trying again. They don't seem to realize that parenting is a never ending process, that you spend 18 years from the time they come home from the hospital, raising them, training them, teaching them that there's right and wrong, good and bad, what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, and that they are responsible for the consequences of their actions. This seems to escape a lot of people's minds, which lead me to believe they're either A. not parents, or B. terrible parents.

Now, I don't believe these 4 friends JUST woke up one day after 13 years and said 'our friend got arrested for bringing a gun to school, HE didn't do anything wrong, our lives are ruined now, let's kill the guy who snitched'. It sounds to me like they've had quite a while to get used to the idea that they can do anything they want.

Anybody else got a thought on this?

I understand the idea that it might be overreaction but threatening to kill somebody isn't anything to be taken lightly.

Indeeeeed, especially when it's among a group of people, you get people together with an idea like that and mob mentality kicks in and as everybody knows, a mob doesn't have any sense, get a mob going and everybody forgets about what's right or wrong if they knew about it in the first place and just ACTS, they DO, they don't THINK.

A good argument for why social networking should be limited to adults, and why having to provide a SSN for additional age/identity verification wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Super, you bring up an excellent point about the mob mentality. That is a definite negative for all the kiddies on FB. I really had never thought about that before and how once a threat is out there, it may be more likely to be acted on.

Supernova wrote:

...Okay, my question for anybody who thinks like 1.: how many people were YOU threatening to kill when you were a kid? How many friends did you have who brought guns to school and THAT was okay but if somebody told the police, THAT was going too far?

That was something that never crossed my mind or the minds of any of my friends. I didn't even know many kids whose families owned guns, let alone anything beyond a BB gun or a hunting rifle.

Supernova wrote:

Apparently some people think parenting is a one time thing that if they don't listen to you once, you shouldn't bother trying again. They don't seem to realize that parenting is a never ending process, that you spend 18 years from the time they come home from the hospital, raising them, training them, teaching them that there's right and wrong, good and bad, what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, and that they are responsible for the consequences of their actions. This seems to escape a lot of people's minds, which lead me to believe they're either A. not parents, or B. terrible parents.

That's the problem with more and more parents nowadays - their precious little demon children can do no wrong. I work in a middle school and the sense of entitlement so many kids feel today - the rudeness and lack of respect and arguing. I had one little idiot telling me today that school rules are dumb and he should be allowed to do exactly as he wants because it's fun. This was after I told him he wasn't allowed to play in the buses where we'd had two kids seriously injured after getting impaled on branches because they were running around in the out of bounds area. One kid was pocked in the neck, narrowly missing an artery, and I can't remember where the other kid was poked. This little idiot, though, is clearly being raised to think the sun rises and sets on him, and it's becoming more and more common. I'm new to the school, so I'm just getting to know the kids, but I've been at the middle school level for awhile and it still astounds me the sense of entitlement these kids have - how spoiled they are.

Supernova wrote:

Now, I don't believe these 4 friends JUST woke up one day after 13 years and said 'our friend got arrested for bringing a gun to school, HE didn't do anything wrong, our lives are ruined now, let's kill the guy who snitched'. It sounds to me like they've had quite a while to get used to the idea that they can do anything they want.

Anybody else got a thought on this?

I don't think they woke up one morning and thought "hey - let's kill this kid after our friend broke the law", either. I think it started way back and these kids have been allowed to get away with it and probably had their parents excusing every behaviour and making excuses when they got caught. There's something truly wrong with these little monsters and I blame not just the ids but the parents who've manged to raise such entitled brats who think posting about killing someone on a public message board is okay.

Indeeeed, now also on the comments page a big issue is the parents, half are saying the parents are partly to blame, the other side's saying that it's not the parents' faults, kids will just turn out how they will, the parents don't know what their kids do, blah blah blah, well parents who don't know what their kids are doing made it their choice not to know, not to get involved, not to always ask them questions, probably just too much work for them if that's the case, easier to just let the kids go out and do whatever the hell they want. People act like parents naturally have no control or influence over their kids...were these people born in pods or something?

Tragedies like Columbine have taught us the hard way that things like this shouldn’t be ignored but after reading what they posted, it sounds like the adolescent equivalent of “beer muscles”. Should their idiot friend who brought a gun to school be in custody? Yeah. Should their comments about taking revenge have been investigated? Fuck yeah. Should they have been arrested too? If posting what was presented here was all they did then I say no. You sit them down in an interrogation room with a couple of detectives and scare the shit out of them but criminal records? How many mothers have told their kids, “You are so dead when your father gets home.” The story didn’t say if the police uncovered an actual plot to kill their victim. If they did, that’s a different story.

Thing of it is I don't think these kids can be scared. Several people pointed out, when you look at their mug shots, they don't look scared, or embarrassed, or devastated, they just look bored.

I'm for that.

Supernova wrote:

Indeeeed, now also on the comments page a big issue is the parents, half are saying the parents are partly to blame, the other side's saying that it's not the parents' faults, kids will just turn out how they will, the parents don't know what their kids do, blah blah blah, well parents who don't know what their kids are doing made it their choice not to know, not to get involved, not to always ask them questions, probably just too much work for them if that's the case, easier to just let the kids go out and do whatever the hell they want. People act like parents naturally have no control or influence over their kids...were these people born in pods or something?

I hate how people will excuse the parents, too. VERY few people are sociopaths. Most criminals are the result of their environment or a mental illness or something like that. These kids have probably been raised with a huge sense of entitlement and a lack of responsibility for anything they do. Their parents were probably the kind that blamed everyone else but their kid when something happened, who blamed the school and ranted on the school staff if their child was caught cheating or stealing, who denied their child had any responsibility for their actions, and so on. It's time parents were held accountable for the actions of their kids!! We live in a generation of over-entitled, over-indulged, spoiled rotten brats - kids who expect everything for free. Not all kids are like that, but the number of kids I see in my middle school who have fancy electronics, fancy clothes, top of the line EVERYTHING... it's just ridiculous. There are great kids out there, but there are also so many kids who take no ownership and whose parents make excuses.

I worked with this one kid last year who ate little more than junkfood (according to the parent,s the doctors said he can have all the junk food he wants because he's small for his age), played violent video games all afternoon and evening, got whatever he wanted, when he wanted it, always used his anxiety disorder as an excuse to get out of work, was childish and immature and allowed to act like a pre-schooler at home (tantrums and tears), and the latest, according to his mom when he didn't hand in his timeline for social studies - it was against his religion to do timelines. This from a kid who told me he didn't follow any religion - they didn't do that kind of thing, he said. If it was against his religion, why wait until the day it was DUE to tell his teacher that? So yeah - there's a prime example of a kid who's been taught the sun rises and sets on him.

Those kids and what they did are a prime reflection of today's society of over-indulged, over-entitled kids.

Indeeeeeeed, you know what, if you can't handle the hard part of being a parent which is the actual job of being a parent and having to say no, having to be the bad guy, having to be tough, having to teach the kids they don't get everything just because they want it, you need to have yourself fixed so you don't reproduce and pass your mini-mes onto us in society who actually follow the rules.

I think a lot of parents prefer to leave the raising of the children to other people. They want to be best friends with their kids, rather than parents. They expect the schools to do everything, while they sit back and are the "good guys".

When I was working in a daycare, we had this one set of parents who always brought their daughter's medication to the daycare and had us administer it, because she hated it and would fuss and squirm. The stupid daycare had a policy that allowed staff to administer medication if parents signed a note and these parents wanted us to be the bad guys so they'd leave us with their job, rather than doing it themselves, though I think the Mom was mentally unbalanced. There were half a dozen kids at that daycare who needed SuperNanny to come in and teach those parents how to parent their squalling brats. I've never worked in such a bad daycare, with parents who were equally bad.

I tell you, every day every thing I hear about kids makes me more and more grateful that I was homeschooled, and especially grateful that if I ever have kids, they will be too so they're not surrounded by that crap all day. Who needs it?