Press clips: In the just-out edition of the Indy, staff writer Keith Hamm breaks news in reporting the latest fall-out from the online video scandal triggered by male students at San Marcos High School in January.
A video posted by the group included one doltish scholar wielding a musket amid threats to eliminate at least 16 girls in the school.
Newsmakers has reported extensively on the wide-ranging political repercussions that have followed the incident, in which high school principal Ed Behrens was fired, against the wishes of a large group of parents, who now are organizing to put up candidates for the two school board seats on the November ballot. They also are considering post-election recall campaigns against two incumbents who voted in favor of the dismissal.
Keith reports:
At least one San Marcos High School boy connected to an online video describing how to kill female fellow students with a rifle and bayonet is facing multiple felonies, according to parents closely connected to the incident.
The 90-second mock instructional video — which features a young male wielding a colonial-era musket as a weapon against “thots,” an acronym for “that ho over there” — was accompanied by a chat-room list of “thots that need to be eradicated,” naming at least 16 female students at San Marcos, Dos Pueblos, and Santa Barbara high schools and a 12-year-old at La Colina Junior High.
And this:
Meanwhile, one parent, whose daughter was targeted and ridiculed on the chat-room list, set out “to make sure my daughter and the other girls were able to feel safe again,” she said, wishing to remain anonymous.
“I wanted the school and the district to be more proactive, but they weren’t. I wanted these boys out of there for good.” Pressing school and law-enforcement officials for details on the punishments and whereabouts of the chat-room boys, she made little headway.
Only after hiring a private investigator, she said, did she learn that some of the boys who had been removed from campus had resumed private online chats about school shootings and were playing a video game recreating the Columbine High School massacre. Late last month, she decided that her daughter would not attend San Marcos High School next year.
The whole story is here.