Alleged threat narrowed to 1 student

Contrary to an earlier report, only one TeWinkle Middle School student allegedly posted a death threat online last month, according to printouts of earlier versions of an Internet discussion page that led to many suspensions on the Costa Mesa campus.

Administrators, however, disciplined the other students listed on the site’s page anyway because they had posted their pictures in a group containing the hateful messages, Principal Dan Diehl said.

On Feb. 16, the day before classes got out for Presidents Day recess, police and school officials found a discussion group on the website Myspace.com that allegedly threatened a girl who attends the school. Afterward, administrators identified 20 students pictured on the site, including the host, and contacted their parents.

Diehl would not elaborate on the students’ penalties, but three parents said their children had been suspended for two days.

“They were disciplined for their involvement in the situation,” Diehl said. “One student was associated with the threats, and only one.”

The day after the group was discovered, Diehl sent out a phone message to all TeWinkle parents explaining what had happened and urging them to monitor their children’s use of the Internet. He said an investigation was pending regarding the student who created the discussion page.

“It’s important that all the kids involved in the situation learn that this is something you just can’t do,” Diehl said. “It’s not appropriate to do that sort of thing. Now we’d like those kids to get on with their lives and the girl to get on with her life as well.”

The printouts of the earlier versions of the Myspace.com discussion group, which a parent provided to the Daily Pilot, show a headline with a violent and anti-Semitic comment about a female, although she is not identified by her last name or as a TeWinkle student. The forum page, which has since been taken down, featured a single comment, posted by the group’s host, expressing a desire to shoot the girl “in the head over thousands of times.”

Diehl would not say how administrators knew the girl’s identity, but added, “We’re certain.”

The group also features names and pictures of 27 other Myspace.com users ? some represented by photographs, some by cartoon logos ? but no other written comments. The printout of the version provided by the parent shows a Jan. 3 date, with the comment inside posted five days later.

Hosts of Myspace.com discussion groups can change the groups’ names at any time, which means that some of the TeWinkle students who joined the page may not have seen the racial slur in the headline. The comment on the forum page would not have been visible on the invitation when users agreed to join.

Parents of the suspended students also gave different accounts of what their children saw on the website. Doug Parker, whose daughter was among the students pictured in the group, said she had seen the anti-Semitic comment when she clicked on the link but thought little of it.

“Her way of thinking was, she knows the boy, she clicked on the next page and then she thought, ‘Whatever,’ and she was done with it,” Parker said. “There was no malice. It was not a big deal to her at all.”

Parent Gina Gores, however, said that when her son agreed to join the discussion group, the racist headline was not present. Her son did not know the girl mentioned on the site, she said, and agreed to join only because he was friends with the host.

Nevertheless, Gores said, she approved of the suspension because she wanted her son to learn a lesson about guilt by association.

“I feel that my son needed to understand the responsibility and severity of this, and I feel it’s something he needed to think about and read when something like this came to him,” she said. “To me, it’s a learning experience. It’s not going to go on his permanent record.”

Although Parker disagreed with the school’s decision to suspend his daughter, he noted that he had sat down with her after the incident and viewed all her friends’ profiles on Myspace.com. He was dismayed by some of the language he saw online, but said it was hardly out of character among young people.

“A lot of these kids have a really crass way of speaking to each other that parents don’t know about,” he said. “There are a lot of conversations where parents and principals would be appalled if they heard the kind of words that go down. This one just ended up on paper.”