- November 1, 2024
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Two 16-year-old Flagler Palm Coast High School students discussed killing their language arts teacher Dec. 10 in a internet chat laced with racial slurs. The teacher is black. Both students are white. One is male, the other female.
The teens told detectives that they’d just been “joking.” The Sheriff’s Office initially determined that the threats did “not appear to be credible,” and did not at first charge the two, but still placed an extra watch on the teacher’s home.
The teacher, speaking to detectives the day after the incident, said she believed the students were capable of harming her. She told detectives that she wanted to press charges to the fullest extent of the law, according to an FCSO news release. The FCSO announced Dec. 12 that it had forwarded to the State Attorney's Office charges for assault with a hate crime enhancement.
The incident happened the morning of Dec. 10. A teacher noticed that one student had typed in all caps on a school-issued laptop, “WERE GONNA GET AWAY WITH MURDUR TONIGHT.”
The teacher notified the school administration, and the school’s IT department pulled up the chat logs of the students’ conversation, according to an FCSO report.
It looked like this:
“My [racial slur] teacher is p---ing me off. ... Im in a bad mood already. I swear im gonna stomp on her f---ing face and smash her weave into the ground,” one student wrote.
The other replied, “LMFAOOOOOO,” then added, “Im about to stomp out of this class, Like f---ing throw the desk at her and leave.”
The other wrote: “Kill her.”
“I will. I won’t get in trouble, you know why?”
“Cuz [racial slur] don’t have rights. ... When are we killing her, lmfaooooo”
“Tonight. I already know her address.”
“1:35am?”
“Okay okay good. We have a time set. ... WERE GONNA GET AWAY WITH MURDUR TONIGHT.”
“Thye gonna give you a medal for killing a [racial slur].”
“Well its not really murder. Were doing the world an amazing thing.”
The students then told racist jokes, according to the report.
The girl, who’d started the conversation, told detectives she’d been joking and had been mad because the teacher wouldn’t let her make up some school work. The boy also said he’d been joking, and “stated that the way he spoke with [the other student] on the computer is the way that students speak to each other,” the report states.
Detectives determined that the students made unlawful threats and created a well-founded fear that violence was possible.
The agency has forwarded to the State Attorney's Office misdemeanor assault charges with a hate crime enhancement, according to the FCSO news release.
“More serious felony charges were explored but the facts of this case did not meet the required elements for a felony charge,” FCSO Chief Steve Brandt, chief of Investigative Services, said in the news release. “Because this is a misdemeanor and is not an immediate arrest exception under Florida law, a physical arrest cannot be made, so our only option was to file recommended charges with the State Attorney’s Office.”
“I was appalled at the language these students were using and the threats made toward this teacher," Sheriff Rick Staly said in a news release. “These racial tones have no place in our community. The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office has a zero tolerance policy on school threats. All threats will be taken seriously and thoroughly investigated and appropriate charges will be made, but often these situations take time to investigate and review the evidence before determining a charge or making an arrest. It is not acceptable to claim you were ‘joking around’ when caught or to threaten anyone.”
The FCSO’s Domestic Homeland Security staff is conducting a threat assessment on the students, according to the news release.
This story was updated Dec. 12 to note that the Sheriff's Office has announced that it has forwarded charges against the two students to the State Attorney's Office.
