Autistic boy charged with terroristic threats

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SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. - A fourteen-year-old autistic boy is facing terrorist charges after a sketch he made in school.
The sketch shows two stick-figures. One of them is labeled ‘Me’ and is shown shooting a gun at another with a teacher’s name above it.
Karen Finn says that her son, 8th grader Shane Finn, doesn’t understand why he is in trouble. She says the boy is autistic and has the mental capacity of a 3rd grader.
Officials at Ridgeview Charter School say the student will face a tribunal and is being charged with making terrorist threats.
Finn says she plans to fight the charges.

I hope this is some sort of formality. "Well, since he did turn something in that does reasonably appear kinda threatening, we have to at least look into the matter," kind of deal. I mean, he did label the drawing, so they'd be insane not to take some kind of action on it. "Terrorism" seems like too heavy of a word, though.

This is nuts. The boy is autistic. He got mad at a teacher, and drew two stick figures. I know how we work; he was just getting some aggression out of his system.

They're acting like this is some blueprint for a complicated attack on the entire school.

He has NO GODDAMN IDEA what he's done wrong and frankly neither do I. How about they talk to the boy and find out what his problem with his teacher is? You know, before they take him to the new Guantanamo Bay and start with the waterboarding?

If the story hadn't mentioned that the kid was 14 years old and lives in Georgia, I would have sworn that this was about Chris-Chan. This sounds like exactly the kind of psychotic stuff he'd pull.

Quote :

Karen Finn says that her son, 8th grader Shane Finn, doesn’t understand
why he is in trouble. She says the boy is autistic and has the mental
capacity of a 3rd grader.

I say we hit him in the head until he becomes smarter or dies. I don't care which.

But seriously, is this retard in an 8th grade class with people who have some chance of learning and a tiny hope of a meaningful future? The article didn't make that clear.

Nightboomfer wrote:

She says the boy is autistic and has the mental capacity of a 3rd grader.

The problem with that excuse is that we live in an age where a lot of schools would have reacted the same if a third grader had been the one to make the threat.

Compared to many of the similar stories we get -- kindergartners arrested for pointing fingers like guns -- this one's almost reasonable. Almost. [Yes, the charge is sensationalistic, but there was a legitimate threat here.]

But the kid's autistic. That means he has, like, super savant powers and those stick figures will, like, come to life and do another Columbine.

ZoZo wrote:

But the kid's autistic. That means he has, like, super savant powers and those stick figures will, like, come to life and do another Columbine.

The really annoying thing is that the one time you have some idiot drawing pictures of themselves shooting teachers and classmates dismissed as blowing off steam, and said student DOES come back and starts shooting, everyone will be mad at the teachers for "ignoring the obvious warning signs."

That kid has an awesome name, goddamn.

That's sad, though I can see why school officials are freaked out. However, he probably had no idea what he was actually implying. I agree that some sort of action should be taken, but labeling him a terrorist is going way too far.

Ugly Swan wrote:

That's sad, though I can see why school officials are freaked out. However, he probably had no idea what he was actually implying. I agree that some sort of action should be taken, but labeling him a terrorist is going way too far.

It sounds pretty clear he knew what he was implying: he wanted to shoot his teacher, or at least had fantasies about it. What he probably had no idea about was how seriously it would be taken, or the potential consequences.

Hey, I got an idea! Let's warterboard him until he admits he's a terrorist and tells us what terrorist groups his connection is with!

TERRORIST!

Let's all howl in panic together!

TERRORIST! TERRORIST! TERRORIST! TERRORIST! TERRORIST! TERRORIST!

It's like a fucking outbreak of goddamn mad cow disease - one cow in a herd shows symptoms of it and every one of them has to be slaughtered and burned.

This reminds me of the time (pre-9/11) when a kid I knew was charged with terrorism after pushing a girl out of his lap. The case with this autistic kid is slightly more relevant, but still--WTF?!

I'd just like to take this time to mention that something about "terroristic" drives me up the wall.

Terrorist is the new communist, duh