Phillip Byrd and Connor Pruett Florida teens plotted Columbine mass shooting at Lehigh Acres school. Boys arrested after tip off.
And today we’re going to learn about how to create another school mass shooting…
Two Florida middle school students have been ordered to remain at a juvenile detention center after allegedly planning to carry out a mass shooting similar to the 1999 Columbine massacre which led to the killing of 12 students and one teacher in Colorado.
Phillip Byrd, 14 and Connor Pruett, 13, eighth-grade students at Harns Marsh Middle School in Lehigh Acres, near Fort Myers, appeared in front of a judge on Sunday morning, WINK News reported.
The judge ordered the two boys to be held for at least 21 days in a juvenile detention center despite the objections of one of the mother’s who claimed her son is ‘just a little boy’ who wasn’t serious about the alleged attack.
‘He’s just a little boy,’ Byrd’s mom, Carrie Tuller, told a courtroom. ‘He didn’t think this was really serious. He didn’t think they were serious.’
Stockpiled and researching
Authorities believed otherwise, after a teacher got a tip that one of the middle schoolers was carrying a gun in his backpack.
‘This could have been the next Parkland massacre, but we stopped them in the planning stages,’ Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno told reporters. ‘We were one second away from another Columbine.’
The sheriff said the teens had been researching details of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting — and tips on how to make a pipe bomb. The boys according to the Sheriff’s office were also researching how to buy guns on the black market.
Police also searched the boys’ homes and found guns, ammunition and several knives.
Mythology of school shootings
The 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, left 17 people dead and 17 others wounded.
In the Lehigh Acres case, both teens are charged with conspiracy to commit a mass shooting and are due back in court Sept. 27.
Marceno said last week that cops didn’t find a gun but one of the teens had a map of the school with the location of all the security cameras in the building marked.
He said the teen suspects were ‘well-known’ to the sheriff’s office after multiple calls for disturbances at their homes.
The boys face charges of conspiring to commit a mass shooting.
The Columbine school mass shooting which involved two teen boys, aged 18 and 17, gunning down 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves was the deadliest mass shooting at a US high school until 2018 when 17 people were killed in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida – which is located approximately 120 miles away from Lehigh Acres.
