How Twitter warned of death threat at St. Louis school
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
The death threat that made a St. Louis school clear out its classrooms and send home students Wednesday had something to do with poet Langston Hughes, and how he is portrayed in an online encyclopedia.
It also had a bit to do with Twitter, a trendy Internet technology that turned a friendly troop of academics from across the country into unknowing sleuths.
It started Tuesday night, with a teacher in Virginia asking her husband for help preparing for class.
And ended Wednesday morning with one relieved school principal.
"It was so amazing," said Katrice Noble, principal at Lift For Life Academy charter school, just south of downtown St. Louis. She was the subject of the death threat.
But it was Jeremy Boggs, 29, a history student in the Ph.D. program at George Mason University, who saw the note first. Or at least the first who did something about it.
Boggs was watching "American Idol," the pop-star reality show, Tuesday night.
His wife, a teacher, asked Boggs to look up Hughes — she was gathering material on the famous poet and playwright.
Boggs found him on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows readers to
add to entries. And there was the note, about halfway down the page, sandwiched
between sections on the poet's homes and his death, and written in bold,
all-capital letters.
"I'M GOING TO SHOOT EVERYBODY AT THAT (expletive) SCHOOL," it said, in part.
"ESPECIALLY KATRICE NOBLE."
Boggs, an alumnus of Virginia Tech, site of the 2007 student shootings that killed more than 30, was unnerved.
"This really freaked me out a little bit," Boggs said.
Sure, he thought, maybe it's a kid pulling a prank. Still, it named the school, the principal and — it would appear — even the student making the threat. "You can't just dismiss it," he said.
So he sought advice from colleagues.
On Twitter.
"Found vandalism on Langston Hughes article where author threatens to shoot people at a school," he wrote, according to Twitter, the online site that allows users to broadcast 140-character messages through cyberspace and with cell phones. "Should I just remove it?"
His message instantly reached across the Midwest.
And, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, it found Marjorie McLellan.
McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University, was writing a grant proposal for Dayton public schools on her computer, when she saw the tweet from Boggs.
"I think you need to report that to editors and police — he names a name," she wrote, according to a log of the conversation on Twitter. "Probably just vitriol but you never know."
Over the next several hours — and entirely via the 140-character tweets — six or seven colleagues figured out who Noble was, where Lift For Life was, and how to reach out to authorities.
They called or e-mailed the school, police and a reporter at the Post-Dispatch.
Still, it was late, and the group's efforts mostly found answering machines.
In something of a last-ditch effort, McLellan called a small-town Ohio police department with a reputation for being tough on Internet crime.
And it was a detective, then, from Xenia, Ohio, who finally got through to Noble, at her desk at Lift For Life, Wednesday morning.
Noble called local police.
But by then police here had gotten the other messages. Before Noble could get up from her desk, St. Louis officers had arrived at the school's doors on South Seventh Street.
Noble called for an early dismissal. Students filed back onto buses. School leaders started talking to students who may have been involved. Police combed the building, and found no immediate threats.
Noble was grateful to the Twitter troop.
"What if things had not gone so smoothly?" she asked. "And we had not taken that precaution?"
But Noble still had her own bit of sleuthing to do.
She called a sixth-grade English teacher at Lift For Life.
Doing any units, she asked, on famous black figures in history? Any students studying Langston Hughes?
Yes, the teacher replied. And yes.
By day's end, police had pinned down the computer used to send the message, Noble said.
It appears to be a student, who wrote and signed the threat in his friend's name. Just a prank between buddies. "They do things not realizing what they've done," Noble said.
The principal said she'll talk to the student and his parents today.
And in what may be the only tragedy to linger, it is likely she'll have no choice but to expel the prankster from school.
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