Columbine Copycats Fill Courts -- Schools Show Little Tolerance For Threats

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - There's an empty desk at a middle school near Fort Lauderdale. Another nine in Lansing, Mich. Three more in Janesville, Wis. And at least four others in Mobile, Ala.

Across the country, youngsters who normally would be in math class or on the playground are in jail cells and homes for delinquents after authorities cracked down on a wave of bomb threats that followed the massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School in April.

Suddenly, each violent note passed between young friends, every threatening remark overheard in the hallways became possible grounds for criminal prosecution.

The juvenile justice system is teeming with hundreds of children - many first-time offenders - who made bomb threats and concocted death plans. Some Columbine copycats thought their threats were a joke. Others wanted a day off from school. Still others really may have wanted people dead.

"Certainly when these cases arose after Columbine, everyone was on notice that a terrible tragedy had occurred, and certainly that had to be a factor that played into how the cases were dealt with," Juvenile Judge Melanie May said in Fort Lauderdale.

Prosecutors and principals took no chances after watching the harrowing scenes of children fleeing hand in hand from the school in Littleton, Colo., where two teenage boys terrorized their schoolmates and the nation. The teens killed 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

"I think we lost a sense of innocence about what goes on in our schools," May said. "I don't think we'll ever be the same."

In the weeks after the April massacre, the National Safety Center estimates at least 3,000 copycat bomb threats were made - about five times the number usually reported in the last few months of a school year.

"In the wake of Columbine, kids were saying more stupid stuff and adults were taking those things more seriously," said Johnson County, Kan., prosecuting attorney Paul Morrison.

Case in point: Ashley Guris, a 12-year-old at Landon Middle School in Jacksonville, was arrested on a felony charge of threatening to blow up her school one day after the Columbine slayings.

"I didn't mean it at all," she later said. "The words just kind of fell out." Charges were dropped.

Others did mean it.

Days after Columbine, a 15-year-old boy in Conyers, Ga., opened fire on his school, wounding six students. Anthony "T.J." Solomon is in prison, fighting a court order to try him as an adult.

In Port Huron, Mich., three boys - ages 13, 14 and 15 - are awaiting trial on charges of plotting to kill students and teachers in a plan based on Columbine.

There are no specific numbers to show courts and schools are meting out tougher punishments post-Columbine. Generally, prosecutors and school districts do not keep separate records of the copycat cases or their resolutions. Most juvenile court records are not public.

Anecdotally, it's clear districts are taking a harder line after Columbine.

In the Fort Lauderdale area, 35 middle-school children are being prosecuted for making some sort of threat, including one who called police to report children were barricaded in a school and being shot.

In Minneapolis, prosecutors said they would review evidence of any crime committed on school property and try to bring a charge that same day to make a statement that such acts will not be tolerated.

In Illinois, Gov. George Ryan this summer signed into law all of the proposals for school safety made by the state attorney general.

Some say the crackdown can go too far.

In Virginia, soon after Columbine, a high-school boy was suspended for coloring his hair blue - even though his hair was blue for five months before the shootings, said Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Virginia.

The school said it was reacting to a mandate by the governor to crack down on potentially dangerous behavior, Willis said. "The problem was the schools seemed unable to draw the distinction between what was a real threat and what was not."

School-safety advocates maintain it's better to be safe than sorry.

Ron Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, suggests schools tell students: "If you make a threat on this campus, your parents will be the second call we make. The first call will be to law enforcement."

With the new school year, the number of reported incidents has dropped dramatically. Still, there were a few.

Would any of these alleged threats been carried out? Juvenile prosecutors nationwide say that's a tough question to answer.

"Our biggest challenge in dealing with these cases is distinguishing between kids whose threats are empty and kids whose threats are real," said Douglas Weiner, chief of the criminal prosecutions in the Cleveland, Ohio-area. "Because we're dealing with kids' safety, there's no margin of error, which makes it especially difficult."