The Joplin Globe
April 22, 2006 01:47 am
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By Jeff Lehr
Globe Staff Writer
RIVERTON, Kan. - Riverton High School sophomore Michaela Ferneau did not take seriously what former boyfriend James Tillman told her in January until this past week.
"He told me not to go to school on 4/20, and that there might be another Columbine," Ferneau told the Globe in a telephone interview on Friday.
Five students, including Tillman, were taken into custody Thursday in an investigation into an alleged plot to commemorate the anniversary of the Columbine school shootings in Colorado with a similar violent rampage at the Riverton school.
None of those detained had been charged by Friday night. Tillman and sophomore Caleb Byrd were named on orders granting writs of habeus corpus filed by their attorneys. Three of them remain unnamed in the public record. One of the students is a senior. The other four are sophomores, according to several students at the school.
Ferneau said she believed Tillman was just joking when he made the remark to her in January.
But, events at school this week, coupled with her memory of his veiled reference to a possible plot, began worrying her to the point that she indirectly set in motion, via the Internet, a chain of communications that led to the detention of the Riverton High School senior and four sophomores, she said.
Ferneau said on Tuesday a teacher overheard one or more of the boys say something that the teacher then took to school administrators.
Superintendent David Walters has said that school officials began looking into a message posted on the Web site MySpace.com on Tuesday. Cherokee County Sheriff Steve Norman has said the message noted the significance of April 20, the date of the Columbine shootings in 1999 and Adolf Hitler's birthday, and stated that there would be a shooting at Riverton High School and students should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets.
The sheriff also has said that school officials began questioning the student who posted the message and talking to other students about it on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Ferneau said by Wednesday rumors about the posted message and a possible shooting plot were circulating through the high school.
She said one student told her they'd heard she was involved and was believed to be one who was going to do the shooting. Another student told her she was an intended target, she said.
The rumors bothered her enough that she went to Cory White, the school's assistant principal, about noon Wednesday and told him she had nothing to do with the matter, that she did not intend to shoot anyone and did not wish to be shot herself.
She said she was so troubled by it all Wednesday that after she got home from school she sent an instant message by computer to a girlfriend in North Carolina whom she'd met over the Internet. She explained to the girlfriend what was troubling her, and the girlfriend encouraged her to tell someone about it all, Ferneau said.
The girlfriend set up a three-way call with her and a male friend of the girl in North Carolina, and they both urged her to take the matter to law enforcement authorities. She said she was still hesitant, but her girlfriend apparently contacted her Sheriff's Department in that state and those authorities contacted the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department.
She said sheriff's investigators came and talked to her on Wednesday night.
She chose not to go to school on Thursday, still fearful of what might happen, she said. She attended Friday but left early after another student made a hurtful remark to her. She said a girl in her English class blamed her for what had happened to Tillman, and told her that he was innocent and she shouldn't have turned him in.
Regional and national media descended Friday on the town of Riverton in the wake of the student arrests.
Superintendent Walters said the school took some extra security steps when the it opened on Friday, posting staff at all entrances. All the entrances but the main entrance were locked down after students arrived.
He said attendance appeared to be about normal on Friday, although he had not checked the actual numbers. He said overall attendance on all grade levels on Thursday was more than 90 percent. It was a little lower in the high school, he said. He said attendance normally is about 92 percent to 93 percent.
Most students the Globe contacted outside the school expressed surprise with the boys' arrest. Senior Ronnie Paxson described the senior boy involved as a "really nice guy," who had just 14 days of school left before he graduated.
"He'd joke around, but he's never done anything like this," she said.
Brandon Hay, another senior, said he thinks it all was a big hoax.
"I've known (the oldest boy involved) for a while, and he definitely wouldn't do something like that," Hay said.
Senior Felicia Evans said all the boys involved were the quiet type. She said school officials continued questioning students Friday in the high school office.
Leslie Wheeler, the mother of two students in the high school, came to pick them up after school on Friday. She acknowledged that concern with Thursday's news prompted her to do so. She said she was surprised that this had happened at the Riverton school because when she'd transferred her children to Riverton from Columbus, they'd had to go through considerable background checking before being admitted to the school.
"I wonder what makes them so mad they'd want to come in and kill somebody," Wheeler said.
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