In my previous post about the foiled Cherokee High School plot in Canton, Georgia, I rolled my eyes at how much attention the media gave to the floor plan. Unsealed warrants accused the suspects of “acquiring a floor plan” of the school, and news anchors treated it like the group had pulled off a heist. My argument was that nobody needs to be a mastermind to get one, because a floor plan can be sketched from memory or photographed off the evacuation map hanging in every school hallway.
Now, the Cherokee County Schools Superintendent, Mary Elizabeth, sent a message to parents saying the school’s floor plans were never accessed. According to WSB-TV, she followed up with Canton police, who told her the suspects had publicly available images of the school rather than the real plans, which are protected documents in Georgia.
So who is correct, the police or the school? It could be that the warrant language was just sloppy or that “floor plan” meant one thing to the investigators and another to the district. Honestly, it doesn’t matter, because a floor plan is not exactly state-secret material.
Does the school keep a special set of blueprints locked in a filing cabinet, complete with secret tunnels and trap doors like a video game or an episode of Scooby-Doo? Of course not. A kid with a phone and a free afternoon can reconstruct everything a plotter would need to know.
However, this almost throwaway report from WSB has a detail in their report that changes everything. They’re reporting that the unnamed juvenile arrested in the plot is a female former student and that the warrants say the two other men conspired with her to provide weapons. This changes the dynamics of this plot immensely, because the profile of the typical school shooting plot doesn’t usually include a girl at the center of it.
As I’ve previously said, I believe the so-called True Crime Community influenced this plot. The TCC has a habit of pushing its adherents toward school violence, but with a female juvenile among the suspects, I have to wonder if a different kind of grooming was going on.
Natalie Rupnow, who carried out the Abundant Life Christian School shooting, was in contact with two adult men from the same corner of the internet, and one of them claimed to be her boyfriend. I’m not saying that’s what happened in Canton. Still, it’s a question worth asking when a 21-year-old in California is charged alongside a teenage girl in Georgia.
So, parents, if you aren’t monitoring your teen’s online habits, you leave them open to being groomed by a school shooting group, an online predator, or both.
It’s much easier to have an uncomfortable conversation now than to read about your kid in the headlines later.
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