Mike Buchanan J4MB: A piece in today’s Times:
Two Florida schoolgirls aged 11 and 12 are facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder after they were accused of plotting to ambush other students, slit their throats and drink their blood in an act of devil worship.
The pair were found hiding in a lavatory at Bartow Middle School. Police said they had planned to turn it into a slaughter chamber and that they were armed with knives and a goblet from which they intended to sip the blood of their victims “and possibly eat flesh”.
“We will leave body parts at the entrance and then we will kill ourselves,” one of them wrote in a message to the other.
The arrest report states: “The plan was to kill at least one student but [they] were hoping to kill anywhere from 15 to 25 students. Killing all of these students . . . would make them worse sinners, ensuring that after they killed themselves . . . they would go to hell so they could be with Satan.” Joe Hall, the police chief in Bartow, said the plot was credible, “troubling” and “not a joke”.
“It shook me to my core when I was notified of it,” he added in a letter sent to parents of other students at the school. “I am very proud of the staff at Bartow Middle School and my staff at the police department for thwarting this plot from becoming a tragedy,” he added.
The students’ names were not released by police, due to their age. Asked by officers what had motivated their gruesome plot, both said that they were practising satanists and that they had drawn up details while watching horror films over the weekend.
On Tuesday, they went to school armed with four knives, a pizza cutter and the goblet. They exchanged messages with each other that morning as they prepared to abscond from a health education class.
“Thank Satan we’re doing this in a bit,” one of the students wrote to the other.
“We shouldn’t have met each other. . . Now death is near,” another of their messages read.
The plot was foiled by chance when a teacher logged the girls as being absent from their class, using a system that alerts parents through an automated telephone call. The mother of one of the girls immediately called the school back asking where her child was, leading to a search by staff and a school police officer.
The girls were “waiting in the bathroom to find smaller kids that they could overpower to be their victims,” said Mr Hall. They told officers that they planned to kill the other children by stabbing them and cutting their throats and would pile up their bodies in a toilet stall, according to the arrest report.
A police search of the 12-year-old’s home found a hand-drawn map of the school with the wording “Go to kill in bathroom” scrawled on it.
“They did make comments that they were willing to drink blood, and possibly eat flesh,” said Mr Hall.
The two students remained in custody yesterday, charged with conspiracy to commit murder, possession of weapons on a school property, and causing disruption to a school campus.
State attorneys were considering whether to prosecute them as juveniles or as adults because of the severity of the crime. Unlike other states, Florida law does not mandate a minimum age at which a child can be transferred to an adult court for prosecution — though to succeed, state attorneys must prove that the crime was sufficiently heinous. The maximum prison sentence for conspiracy to murder is 30 years, though the severity of the penalty depends on a sliding-scale of potential charges.
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