PC overkill alive and well in Cedar Creek
Cedar Creek High School in Galloway Township, N.J., is a special magnet school which focuses on engineering and environmental sciences, with special hands-on learning.
But when a teacher saw a drawing of “what appeared to be weapons” in a 16-year-old student’s notebook the week after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., she alerted school administrators, who called in the police.
Responding officers determined the boy “demonstrated behavior that caused them to be concerned,” and brought in the Egg Harbor City police, search dogs from the Hamilton Township Police Department, the Atlantic City Police Department, the Gloucester County Sheriff’s Department, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department, the Millville Police Department, the Salem County Sheriff’s Department, the Atlantic City Police Department’s Bomb Squad, the Oceanville Fire Department, and Galloway EMS to search the boy’s house.
There, they found “electronic parts” and “several types of chemicals that when mixed together could cause an explosion,” according to investigators.
The boy was arrested on charges of possession of an explosive device, even though those chemicals were not mixed together, and even though Greater Egg Harbor Regional High School District Superintendent Steve Ciccariellos said the boy was not in “conflict” with any student or teacher; police admitted the boy didn’t threaten anyone, and there was “no indication he was making a bomb, or using a bomb, or detonating a bomb,” Police Chief Pat Moran said, adding the boy cooperated fully with investigators.
Ciccariellos praised the teacher for having “the sense to report it to school officials,” and now that the boy is in juvenile detention, it’s “business as usual” at the school, and by the way, even without the Connecticut shooting being so fresh in the news, “we would have handled this exactly the same way.”
(RC/Press of Atlantic City)
Filed under: Politics & economics, Society & human issues
“Home of the Pirates”
Oh, really? Will they be tearing down that sign?
Pirates are very naughty! They are much naughtier than naughty schoolboys.
I think that if I looked at the fertilisers I have in my garden shed, I could probably make an explosive if I mixed them together.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be saying that……
Heat water in a sealed container and – bang! Dodgy stuff that water.
…and have you heard about the stuff they put in some cars? People can just buy it and the state does nothing! Why do they never think of the chiiiilddddrrrrrennn!!!!!
Good job he, or his parents, didn’t have the copy of Analog that had the details of making an atomic bomb in it.
As for electronics, any youngster worth anything and going to a technical based school will have more than enough parts about to make a nice flashing led display. I also wonder how all those police would react to one of my computers – it has a display that shows the CPU clock speed. Would they take it a a bomb counting down or something?
Gad! Things really have changed.
When I was in the Fourth Form at school our Chemistry Teacher asked us if we’d like to make some really nasty smells. He gave us the names and chemical formulae for the smells and told us to research how to make them. Success involved the partial evacuation of the school!
Nothing daunted, our Teacher’s next poser was the manufacture of explosives. Again various formulae were given with the restriction that only the most potent were to be made. How that was to be determined we were told to find out. We also had to factor in safety considerations in our answers. I didn’t know that if you ground your sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate too finely spontaneous ‘combustion’ (aka BANG) was highly likely!
What a way to make young lads learn about Chemistry!
Oh, the winner (not me) got to blow a 2-foot deep hole in the cricket pitch!
It’s New Jersey, what can you expect?
That’s a point.