The nature of that online exchange is all there is to this case. Facebook has removed the full exchange from public view. The police and prosecutor have chosen to cherry-pick the exchange in their court filings, omitting any context and perhaps part of the post itself.
As CNN reported it: "According to court documents, Justin wrote "I'm f---ed in the head alright. I think I'ma (sic) shoot up a kindergarten and watch the blood of the innocent rain down and eat the beating heart of one of them.' "
None of this would have mattered any more that the billions of other Facebook posts except that a Canadian woman, self-described as a "concerned citizen," launched into vigilante mode and discovered that there was apparently an elementary school close to an address in Austin where Carter once might have lived. So she called the Austin police and made her accusation.
At the time, Carter was 18, working in San Antonio, and living in with a roommate in New Braunfels.
The Authorities
Arrested Him at Work, then Acted as if it Was All Over
"The next day, February 14th, he (Justin) went to work," his mother explained. "The Sheriffs came to his job and arrested him. Then he was transported from San Antonio to Austin because the woman in Canada found his father's address where he used to live which is 100 yards from an elementary school. At that point, he sat in jail and bond set at $250,000. His father and I don't have that kind of money. We thought honestly that yeah that was a pretty bad thing that he said and we can see why they would be concerned after the shooting in Newtown happened a couple months before. So ya everyone was on edge."
Not unreasonably, Carter's parents expected the police to question him, investigate, figure out that their son had a smart mouth, but wasn't a threat to anyone.
"We thought that once the police talked to him, which we thought would be that day, they would understand it was a stupid comment that he made, a dumb joke, and once they searched his home they would see there were no weapons and he wasn't a threat."
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