Turns out NE Patriots receiver Julian Edelman may have stopped a school shooting before it happened.
Here’s how:
NY TIMES – The New England Patriots receiver Julian Edelman was in Texas visiting his former teammate Danny Amendola late last month when he received a direct message on his Instagram account: “Dude, there is a kid in your comment section says he s going to shoot up a school, i think you should alert the authority.”
Edelman instantly thought of the mass shooting about five weeks earlier in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 people were killed. “With the emotions of what happened, and I have a kid now, I said, holy Toledo, what is going on?” Edelman said in an interview this week.
He quickly notified his assistant in Boston, Shannen Moen, who looked through the hundreds of comments that followed Edelman’s most recent post on Instagram. She found the alarming message: “I’m going to shoot my school up watch the news.”
Moen called 911, and a police officer soon arrived. The officer saw the screen shot, then called her chief, who sent two detectives to Moen’s house. The detectives collected some information about the person who posted the threat. They then returned to their office, where they made an emergency records request for account information, which allowed them to determine the sender’s email and IP address, which was traced to Port Huron, Mich.
The detectives called police in Michigan, who immediately drove to the house where the threatening message originated. When the police arrived at the address, they found a 14-year-old boy, who, they said, admitted to posting the threat. They also found two rifles that belonged to his mother, according to Capt. Joseph Platzer of the Port Huron Police Department.
Platzer said the boy’s threat was aimed at the middle school that he attends in a nearby township. The boy was taken to a juvenile-detention center, where he remains. He was charged with making a false report of a threat of terrorism, a felony that is punishable by up to four years in jail.
Here’s the DM Edelman got:
Edelman is so grateful he’s going to send jesseyi3 a special care package, according to the Times reporting.
Here’s the screenshot of the actual threat made by the 14-year-old Michigan boy:
Who knows if the kid would have actually followed through, but I’m glad they got the kid and I hope he serves some time and gets the help he needs. They days of taking these kind of threats lightly is over.
UPDATE: The source I used for the original photo incorrectly stated that it was Julian Edelman. I’ve now updated the photo to the correct person. Thanks to my commenters for noticing.