No crime committed in Northwest student blog incident, Tarrant DA says
The Tarrant County district attorney’s office will not pursue criminal charges concerning a student-written blog that seemed to threaten other students with death, the office said Wednesday.
After reviewing evidence regarding the blog of a student at John Tidwell Middle School in the Northwest school district, the agency concluded that no crime had been committed.
“Although the blog in question contains many disturbing, graphic and offensive descriptions of violence, it does not meet the legal requirements for a charge of criminal or delinquent conduct under Texas law,” the office said in a statement Wednesday.
An eighth-grade blogger is accused of writing “Killing Children,” an 11-part story that details attacks on specific students with knives and sexual assaults, WFAA/Channel 8 reported. Parents said that the student’s parents withdrew him from school weeks ago but that he returned after spring break.
The student’s status has not changed and he is still attending Tidwell, district spokesman Jerry Cantu said. The student is believed to have written the story before he became a student in the district, Cantu said.
“We understand the parents were extremely upset by this, but at the same time, the student did not violate any code of conduct in the student handbook,” Cantu said.
The day before March 23 protests outside the school by parents and students concerned about the writings, the district released a statement in which the father of the accused child said the boy was “evaluated for two weeks and then released.”
“He additionally indicates his son was encouraged to write, writes frequently and has no intentions of harming anyone,” the statement said.
District officials say that because the story wasn’t written on or using school property, they cannot legally remove the child from school; they called the situation a police matter.
This report includes material from the Star-Telegram archives.
Mitch Mitchell, 817-390-7752
This story was originally published April 1, 2015 at 5:24 PM with the headline "No crime committed in Northwest student blog incident, Tarrant DA says."