Web discussion stopped school shooting plot

RIVERTON, Kan. -- A student at the small-town high school where five teens are accused of planning an attack said Friday that rumors were rampant on the day before their arrest, prompting some schoolmates to tell the suspects: "Whatever you do, don't shoot me."

Freshman Nathan Spriggs, 15, also said his friends, who are suspected of planning to shoot fellow students and school employees, told him they had posted a threat on the Internet as a joke and feared they would be suspended or expelled for doing it.

Riverton High School officials were taking no chances.

The boys, ranging in age from 16 to 18, were arrested Thursday, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre, just hours before they planned to shoot fellow students and school employees, authorities said.

A 'resounding theme'

"What the resounding theme is: They were actually going to do this," Cherokee County Sheriff Steve Norman said.

The teens planned to wear black trench coats and disable the school's camera system before starting the attack between noon and 1 p.m. Thursday, Norman said. Sheriff's deputies found guns, ammunition, knives and coded messages in the bedroom of one suspect and documents about firearms and references to Armageddon in two suspects' school lockers.

Attorney General Phill Kline said Friday that he would decide early next week whether to charge the five and whether to do so as juveniles or adults.

Apparently, they had been plotting since the beginning of the school year. Norman said school officials began investigating Tuesday after learning a threatening message had been posted on MySpace.com.

"The message, it was brief, but it stated that there was going to be a shooting at the Riverton school and that people should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets," Norman said.

It also discussed the significance of April 20 as Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School attack in Colorado, in which two students wearing trench coats killed 13 people before committing suicide.

School officials identified the student who posted the message and talked to several of his friends, he said.

But Riverton school district superintendent David Walters said the significance of the threat did not become clear until Wednesday night, after a woman in North Carolina who had chatted with one of the suspects on Myspace.com notified authorities there would be about a dozen potential victims, at least one of them a staff member.

Riverton student Michaela Ferneau said Friday she had heard she was one of the targets.

Back in January, one of the teen suspects had talked about Columbine, but "we thought he was joking because he was always joking about stuff like that," Ferneau told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday.

"I guess I told on them, apparently, when I didn't know I did," she said. "It's kind of scary to know that people from a little town like this would even try anything like that."

Often in trouble

Kline said he expected a judge to decide Friday night whether there was cause to detain the boys until they could be charged.

Four younger than 18 were being held at a juvenile detention center. An 18-year-old was in the Cherokee County jail.

Four of the suspects were arrested at their homes Thursday; the fifth was taken into custody at the school.

MySpace.com -- a social networking hub with more than 72 million members -- released a statement declining to discuss the case because of the investigation, adding that it has provided users with mechanisms to report inappropriate content.

Riverton is a small community of about 600 people along what once was the famed Route 66 in southeast Kansas, near the Oklahoma and Missouri borders.