By all appearances, the failing student intended to take shoot up a campus overflowing with students showing up to take final exams.
“John Hagins, 19, threatened an attack similar to the 1999 mass shooting at the Columbine High School,” Daytona, Florida, police say (read story here).
Hagins is being held on charges of making threats, terrorism, and attempted first-degree homicide. “He may want to claim that it was all a joke and he wasn’t serious about it. But we don’t find anything funny about discussing a mass shooting on campus,” the police chief said.
If that’s what Hagins ultimately claims in court, he may have a hard time persuading a jury he was joking or it was just idle talk, when they see photos of the backpack police seized when they arrested him (photo below). Hagins had a collapsible rifle, ammunition, and a reason to be disgruntled and angry at the college (even if his failing grades were his own fault).
He was caught because he posted incendiary comments on a campus Snapchat and two other students who spotted them called the police, who “rushed to where the suspect lived and detained him as he was coming out of his apartment,” the police chief said. CNN says, “He had planned to go to a shooting range for practice and then to the campus, according to the police,” who have interviewed the suspect, and it appears that’s based on what he admitted to them.
It now looks like the students who reported his SnapChat comments, who haven’t been identified as yet, saved a lot of lives.
