Teens Who Plotted School Shooting to Appear in Court Friday

For those who feel we don't have a problem with the youth in this country, read on...

RIVERTON, Kan. - Five teenage boys suspected of planning a shooting spree at their high school are expected to appear in court Friday to face charges, the Kansas state attorney general said.
The boys, ranging in age from 16 to 18, were arrested Thursday, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre, just hours before they planned to shoot fellow students and school employees, authorities said.
They were stopped after one of them discussed the plot on a Web site, law enforcement and school officials said.
The boys, "What the resounding theme is: They were actually going to do this," Cherokee County Sheriff Steve Norman said.
The suspects are expected to appear in court Friday, when charges are likely to be announced, said Attorney General Phill Kline, whose office took over the prosecution at the request of the county attorney.
The four suspects younger than 18 were being held Thursday at a juvenile detention center in Girard. The 18-year-old was in the Cherokee County Jail. No decision has been made on whether to charge the four juveniles as adults, Kline said.
Four suspects were arrested at their homes; the fifth was taken into custody at the school. None of the teens' names were released.
Sheriff's deputies found guns, ammunition, knives and coded messages in the bedroom of one suspect, Norman said. Authorities also found documents about firearms and references to Armageddon in two suspects' school lockers.
Officials assured the community that the 270 or so students at Riverton High School were safe and school would continue as normal Friday.
Deputies' interviews with the suspects indicated they planned to wear black trench coats and disable the school's camera system before starting the attack between noon and 1 p.m. Thursday, Norman said. The suspects apparently had been plotting since the beginning of the school year.
School officials began investigating on Tuesday after learning that a threatening message had been posted on a social networking site, he said.
The sheriff said the message discussed the significance of April 20, which is Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School attack in Colorado, in which two students wearing trench coats killed 13 people and committed suicide.
"The message, it was brief, but it stated that there was going to be a shooting at the Riverton school and that people should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets," Norman said.
School officials identified the student who posted the message and talked to several of his friends, he said.
But Riverton school district Superintendent David Walters said the significance of the threat did not become clear until Wednesday night, after a woman in North Carolina who had chatted with one of the suspects on Myspace.com received more specific information that there would be about a dozen potential victims, at least one of whom was a staff member. She notified authorities in her state, who contacted the sheriff's department, Norman said.
He said that the potential victims were popular students and that the suspects may have been bullied.
"I think there was probably some bullying, name calling, chastising," Norman said. He also said investigators had learned the suspects were computer buffs who liked violent video games.
MySpace.com - a social networking hub with more 72 million members - released a statement declining to discuss the case because of the investigation, adding that it has provided users with mechanisms to report inappropriate content.
Barbara Gibson, a 17-year-old junior at the high school, said her classmates didn't seem too bothered by the threat.
"A lot of people just talked about it," she said. "But there wasn't much reaction."
Riverton is an unincorporated area of about 600 people along what once was the famed Route 66 in southeast Kansas, near the Oklahoma and Missouri borders.