A 14-year-old in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, allegedly spent close to two weeks planning to shoot up his middle school and stream the whole thing live on August 10th. New Mexico State Police say they started investigating on July 30th after getting a tip about a threat against Santa Rosa Middle School. Working with local police and the FBI, they tracked the suspect down fast enough to make a difference.
The kid was said to have used Discord to talk to someone else about a plan to shoot up the school on the first day of classes and broadcast it live while he did it. He didn’t stop at talk, either. He allegedly took his own photos of the guns he planned to use and pulled up Google Maps images of the school to plan it out. That’s the kind of target-recon behavior that separates a kid mouthing off from a kid building a plan.
I can’t talk about the Discord angle without flagging what everyone who’s tracked this stuff for more than five minutes already suspects. Livestreamed shootings planned and coordinated over Discord are indications of a potential connection to the so-called True Crime Community ecosystem. That’s the loose, decentralized network of teens and twenty-somethings who trade in shooter fandom, gore, and copycat fantasies across Discord servers that most of their parents don’t know exist. I don’t have confirmation this kid was plugged into TCC specifically, but the pattern fits the mold this “community” has been producing for years now.
New Mexico is no stranger to any of this, unfortunately. The most infamous case in the state’s history, in my estimation, happened at Aztec High School back in December of 2017. 21-year-old former student William Atchison walked into the building disguised as a current student and opened fire, killing two classmates, Casey Marquez and Francisco Fernandez, before turning the gun on himself.
He’d bought the Glock he used just a month before the attack, and the FBI had actually interviewed him a year earlier over comments he’d made online about planning a mass shooting, which didn’t stop him from legally buying that gun anyway. His motives ranged from extremist ideology to incel resentment to just another copycat chasing infamy.
But getting back to Santa Rosa, police traced the guns in those photos to the boy’s stepfather, who confirmed the firearms were his. A search of his house turned up the handgun from the photos. A rifle tied to the plan turned up at a second address entirely. So somewhere between the stepfather owning these guns and his stepson photographing them for a school shooting plot, nobody in that house noticed a 14-year-old had hands on a handgun and access to a rifle stashed somewhere else.
We can’t keep asking kids to be the responsible ones when the adults around them can’t be bothered to know where their own guns are. This stepfather isn’t facing charges as far as anyone’s reported, and maybe under New Mexico law there’s nothing to charge him with, but legal isn’t the same thing as fine.
A kid does not develop an at least two-week plan to livestream a mass shooting in a vacuum, and he definitely doesn’t do it without a gun he can point a camera at. The state charged the boy with making a shooting threat, a fourth-degree felony, and interference with public officials, a petty misdemeanor.
NMSP says they beefed up police presence at Santa Rosa schools on August 10th as a precaution. That’s a small mercy in a story built entirely out of small mercies. A tip that came in on time, an investigation that moved fast, and a livestream that never happened.
None of that was luck. All of it could’ve gone the other way in a house with less attentive neighbors and slower cops. The guns, though, were just sitting out in the open the whole time.
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