Comment overheard in cafeteria leads to 770 counts of attempted murder

By Frank Brutus

Telling her sister she “hated” her.  Not letting a classmate sit beside her in the cafeteria.  Pushing, shoving and skipping in the line at dismissal.  Talking back once to her art teacher.

Chief: "We need more body bags."

These are just some of the so-called “gateway” behaviors that Town of Tonawanda Police Chief William K. Charmin says were ignored by Tonawanda Middle School officials, where a 10-year-old was charged yesterday with 770 counts of attempted murder after she was overheard telling a classmate during lunch that she wished “a tornado would come and destroy this stupid school.”

This incident follows Thursday’s domestic terror charges lodged against an 11-year-old who compiled a “hit list” on a school computer.

Chief Charmin, standing beside Tonawanda Middle School Principal Del Griffith at a grim afternoon press briefing, called the cases “some of the most shocking examples of immaturity and thoughtlessness that I have seen in my thirty-two years on the force.”

“Let me put this in bold terms,” said Charmin.  “Our Police Department has about 10 body bags at our disposal.  If this 5th grader’s wishes were carried out, we’d have been looking for almost 760 more bags from neighboring police agencies to deal with all the victims.”

“Kids are not the same today as when I was growing up,” lamented Charmin, who used an abacus when he was in school and still struggles to find the power button that activates his Dell computer at Police Headquarters.  “Today’s kids are violent, self-centered, insolent and rude.  I think we prevented a true tragedy at the Middle School by acting as swiftly as we did to apprehend these violent students.”

The Chief, who learned about his Department-issued cell phone’s ability to send a text message at a staff development meeting last month, set up a series of “sting operations” in January after Principal Griffith called to alert him that “a lot” of Middle School students were being observed by teachers and cafeteria monitors as acting “immature, mean and just plain nasty.”

According to a school official who requested to remain anonymous, the 10-year-old student, whose name is being withheld by police, has not yet  learned to harness the destructive power of tornadoes but police and school officials said they could not afford to wait any longer.

“It’s the same old story,” said the administrator.  “If the parents of these kids weren’t agitating and intellectually limited, we’d have been forced to find different scapegoats to send a message to our students that wishing for school-wide destruction and the death of your meanest teachers is not OK.”

Griffith, who has been a Principal at the Middle School since 1990, acknowledged that since the 770 attempted murder charges were placed against the student on Friday, “dozens and dozens” of classmates have come forward with additional reports of unacceptable behaviors exhibited by their peers.

“We have a problem brewing right under our noses and we need to find a way to deal with these issues,” said Griffith.  “When I was in middle school no one ever wished ill will toward their classmates or teachers.  We wished for the death and destruction of Russians and North Vietnamese instead.”

Griffith said that a school-wide assembly will be held Monday starring Jiggles the Clown to remind students about the importance of telling police about the inappropriate comments made by “weird, socially awkward kids before it’s too late and everyone in Tonawanda Middle School gets slaughtered.”