A teenager who was jailed for posting a threat that he will open fire on a kindergarten class in Texas could remain behind bars for as much as eight years.
Nineteen year old Justin Carter says his Facebook post, written on Feb. 13 and read that he wanted "to shoot up a kindergarten, watch the blood rain down and eat the beating heart out of one of them,” was just a joke.
He certainly wasn’t considered to be joking by prosecutors, who charged him with a third degree felony for making “terroristic threats,” San Antonio Express News reports.
Carter, who was 18 when he wrote the Facebook post, has now been in jail for nearly 100 days. In a letter written to the judge behind bars, he wrote, “What I said was terrible, mean and downright stupid. The misunderstanding was that I wasn't trying to scare anyone, I was trying to be witty and sarcastic. I failed and I was arrested.”
His mother, Jennifer Carter, has been trying to get national and international attention about her son’s case and told CNN recently she “honestly assumed that once the police spoke to him they would understand that this was just a joking comment that he made and that it wasn't serious."
A petition has been created to free Carter of these charges, and it’s 75,000 signatures strong.
image: Change.org petition