Florida police arrested a teen they said made threats to fatally shoot seven people at school on a video game chat using a fake name.
The written threat warrants an arrest under Florida law, police said.
“I Dalton Barnhart vow to bring my fathers m15 to school and kill 7 people at a minimum,” the Volusia Sheriff Department said the teenage boy wrote on a video game messaging board.
Police tweeted a video of the arrest on Monday.
“The name was fake, and the young man responsible for the comment insisted it was a joke,” police said.
His mother pushed back on the arrest insisting her son is “just a little kid playing a video game,” according to a video police shared of the arrest.
“Joke or not, these types of comments are felonies under the law. After the mass violence we’ve seen in Florida and across the country, law enforcement officers have a responsibility to investigate and charge those who choose to make these types of threatening statements,” police tweeted.
The suspect behind the alleged threat is a 15-year-old boy from Seabreeze High School. {mosads}
The FBI alerted Volusia County authorities on Thursday and deputies arrested the suspect the next morning, The Associated Press reports.
The FBI was anonymously tipped by someone who saw it on the online chat, BuzzFeed News reported, citing an arrest affidavit.
“These kids say stuff like that all the time. It’s a joke to them. It’s a game. And it’s so wrong. I hate that game,” the mother said in the video.
“How do we know he’s not going to be like the kid from Parkland, or he’s not going to be like the kid that shot up Sandy Hook? We don’t know that,” the officer responds, referencing two of school mass shootings.
The officer also asks the woman if she has a gun at home. She responds yes.
“Ok, he has hands and feet and he can grab your gun and go do something,” the officer responds.
“He would never do anything like that anyway,” she said.
“We don’t know,” the officer said.
Police said they were taking the teen to juvenile detention.
“He made the charge, he’s going to face the consequences,” the officer said.