A South Carolina high school student says he was arrested Tuesday — not for using a gun but for writing about it.
A teacher had asked Alex Stone, 16, and his ninth-grade classmates to describe themselves in a few sentences and write a mock Facebook status, according to WCSC News.
Stone wrote a fictional account about killing his neighbor’s dinosaur, saying he bought a gun to “take care of the business.” His intent was to be funny, he said, but school officials weren’t laughing.
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Instead, they contacted police, who searched Stone’s locker and book bag but found no gun, according to WCSC.
“I could understand if they made him re-write it, because he did have ‘gun’ in it,” Stone’s mother, Karen Gray, told the CBS affiliate. “But a pet dinosaur? I mean, first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”
Gray said the matter could have easily been settled without calling police. Instead, school officials never bothered to call her or get her son’s “point of view,” she said.
“I never heard from the school, never,” she said. “They never called me.”
Though he now regrets writing the story, Stone told WCSC he doesn’t “see the harm in it.”
“I think there might have been a better way of putting it, but I think me writing like that, it shouldn’t matter unless I put it out towards a person,” he said.
In addition to his arrest, Stone was suspended from school for the rest of the week, his mother said. He is due back in class on Monday.
Watch the full story here via WCSC:
