A few years ago, I played an online game which involved a lot of IM's between the players. I would check my character every morning with my morning coffee before work. Sometimes there would be other players and we would chat a bit before I signed off to get ready for work.
One morning there was a young man onine that played the game. He began to IM me and as I am a mature woman, I could tell that he was upset about something. I talked to him for a while and he told me that his girlfriend had dumped him and gave me a URL to a site he created in honor of her. It gave his real name on that page. Anyway, I continued to talk to him and found that another problem in his life was that he had been looking forward to a science fair at his school but that he had been disqualified due to the fact that he had gotten in trouble for fighting in school and had been suspended for a few days. He was angry, upset and told me that he was going to make everyone pay for barring him from the science fair to be held at his school the coming Saturday (this conversation was on a Wednesday). I had a bad feeling about what he was saying and gently attempted to get hiim to give me more details. He alluded to the fact that anyone could build a bomb as the info was on the 'Net and that he was intelligent enough to do that if he wanted. As the conversation continued, I could see that he was getting more 'dark' and believed that there was nothing left in life for him. He continued to talk about how everyone was going to pay but aside from the remark about the bomb building, he gave me no details. He did make a reference to Columbine and that I would hear his name on the news next Saturday.
This conversation was very upsetting to me as I could tell he was mentally unstable, feeling that his girlfriend needed to know that he loved her and would prove how much soon and wanting to pay back the teachers who had disqualified him from the science fair which he had been looking forward to for a long time and which he had taken a very long time putting together his project which he felt was the winning project should he be allowed to enter it. I did my best to dissuade him from taking any type of action and tried to cool him off but nothing I said seemed to do any good.
I finally signed off but printed out the IM log of the entire conversation. I then went to his other site and got his real name. I showed the log to my husband (who always believed I should stay out of situations on the internet) and he thought it sounded really disturbing and said I might want to contact the authorities so that they could look into it. When I got to work I called my local FBI office and talked to an agent about this. He had me fax a copy of the IM log over to him then called me back and told me that they needed the headers from an email from this kid so that they could trace his address. I emailed the young man and played on his ego by asking for help about the game. He emailed me back, and I faxed the email with the headers over to the FBI.
Aweek later, the FBI agent called me at work and told me that they had traced the address and had turned the information over to the Delaware State Police. They went to the house and found that the young man had built several pipe bombs and had access to weapons. He said that they arrested the boy, confiscated all the computers in the house and that if I wouldn't had taken time to talk to this boy, there would had been a real tragedy.
The point I am trying to make is, do not take these threats with a grain of salt but listen to what they say and try to get information out of them and to contact the authorities. It's better to make one mistake and have it have no real basis than to ignore these kids and have a real tragedy. According to the FBI, if I wouldn't had taken the time to talk to the boy and then contact them, there could have been a loss of lives and thanked me for getting involved.
Listen to these kids and don't blow off what they say. You too could prevent a tragedy.
Early Sunday morning in Crandon, a small Wisconsin logging town, 20-year-old deputy sheriff Tyler Peterson went on a shooting rampage killing six people and critically wounding another before authorities fatally shot him. A part-time police officer, Peterson fired thirty rounds of ammunition on his ex-girlfriend and a group of friends who had gathered for pizza and movies to celebrate homecoming weekend. Who was Tyler Peterson, and what drove him to murder six people in cold blood? What is the profile of a mass murderer, and does he fit the description? How could Peterson have slipped through the system to become a law enforcement officer, and how do we keep it from happening again? Every day, more than 80 Americans die from gun violence.* From the 1999 Columbine massacre to the nation's deadliest shooting rampage in history at Virginia Tech last April, mass shootings in America continue to draw world scrutiny. Be there when Dr. Phil asks the tough questions. If it's happening now, Dr. Phil is gonna talk about it now! Share your thoughts, join the discussion.
I was not going to respond with a comment because people with opinions like yours are the ones who feed the ignorance of others. 
