District: Lexington student edited photo to look like other student threatened school
A social media post that circulated Gilbert High School appeared to show a student threatening violence against the school — but the post was faked by another student, school district officials said.
A student of the Lexington 1 school is charged with making threats against students after he edited an image of another student and wrote a “menacing” caption, officials said.
Wednesday, students shared the image with administrators. The image appeared with a caption that “seemed to be a threat,” according to a school district statement.
School officials notified the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, which began investigating.
After school officials and deputies looked into the origins of the image, they found out the student in the picture didn’t make the image or the threat. The pictured student had nothing to do with circulating the image either, district spokesperson Mary Beth Hill said.
“The student in the image did nothing wrong,” she said in a statement.
Another male student took a picture with his phone of the person in the image and added the caption, Hill said. The caption was “about shooting up the school,” according to Lexington County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Adam Myrick.
The male student started circulating the image, and other students shared the image over social media and phone-to-phone through the iPhone AirDrop feature, Hill said.
Circulation of the image became such a problem that letters had to be sent to parents about the incident, according to Hill.
The student who made the image wasn’t friends with person in the picture, and the image wasn’t a type of friend-to-friend joke, Hill said.
Deputies interviewed the student responsible for the image and released him to his parents. School administrators suspended the student and recommended him for expulsion.
In its statement, the district said it “encourages students and their parents to report any safety concerns to a school administrator, School Resource Officer, school counselor, teacher or another employee.”
“The district also has a Tip Line (803-636-8317), which students, parents, and others can use to report safety concerns anonymously,” the district added. “Students can access the Tip Line online, by telephone, by texting information or by emailing details of your concern to 1607@alert1.us.com.”