The officials are promoting a young Tennessee player as a hero after the child frustrated a supposedly planned and discussed mass shooting at a chat site of players by two teenagers from Tehama County.
The two children, 14 years and 15, had planned a shooting at the Evergreen Institute of Excellence, in the city of Cottonwood in northern California, where they are expected to kill up to 100 people, said the Tehama Dave County Seriff on Tuesday a press conference. Before the deadly attack, the two close friends supposedly planned to kill a game of their parents.
“This was serious,” Kain said. “Our community in general would have changed.”
The two friends allegedly wrote a manifesto for the deadly attack, photos of themselves with the same clothes and passed through the adolescent murderers in the massive shooting of Columbine of 1999, and spoke in the conversation of an online game about the planned shooting.
It was in the chat of that game that a Tennessee boy realized the possible attack, and decided to call the Tehama County Sheriff’s office in the case of May 9 about the disturbing chat.
Kain said the player’s decision to call the authorities about the possible attack could have saved lives.
“This young man had the courage and the heroic instincts to call our agency and notify us to mitigate any possible threat to our citizens and, possibly, our young people,” Kain said.
The player provided the researchers the label of the suspect player, the content of the chat, as well as a shared photo, one of the suspects posted on them posing as the handles of the Columbine school.
Kain said the shared image helped researchers contact school administrators, identify the two students and put them in custody.
“Our researchers took that advice seriously from the beginning,” Kain said.
The researchers attended search orders in the houses of the two suspects, where they found improvised explosive devices that believe they were made to use in the school attack. Firearms were also seized, Kain said.
The two friends had planned to advance with the attack on May 9, but they did not do it because one of them backed away, he said. It is not clear what the motivation for the shooting at school was, but Kain said that one of the suspects teenagers spoke about being intimidated when the researchers interviewed.
The two suspects were reserved under suspicion of making criminal threats, possession of a destructive device, manufacturing a destructive device and conspiracy to commit a serious crime, Kain Sac. Researchers are also working with prosecutors and analyzing the possibility of a conspiracy charge to commit mass murders.
The two adolescents appeared in the Thorsday court, and they were ordered to remain in custody, for a request from the Tehama County District Prosecutor’s Office, according to an office statement.
Kain said Sheriff’s officials have spoken with school administrators to provide additional security at school, but said the threat was isolated to the two alreamy suspects in custody.
As a confidence sign, the Sheriff said that the son returned to classes at the same secondary school on Monday.
Kain refused to sacrifice any detail about the minor player who reported the threat, but said that he and his parents told them that they invested that they visit Tehama County to be recognized.
