Boys in Florida Arrested for Plotting ‘Columbine-Style Attack’

In a report by WINK-TV, a local news network in Fort Myers, Florida, two teenagers were arrested after being accused of plotting a “Columbine-style” shooting at Harns Marsh Middle School in Lehigh Acres, Florida. The two boys, Connor Pruett, 13, and Phillip Byrd, 14, were detained Sept.9 when a school resource officer had notified the police that one of them had a gun in his backpack. Although no weapons were found on either of the students, an investigation found that the two had amassed guns, ammunition and knives, along with a map of the school and location of the surveillance cameras. According to Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno, the boys had been inspired by the Littleton, Colorado, Columbine school shooting in April 1999, which took the lives of 13 and injured many others. Marceno told a press conference, “We were one second from a Columbine here,” and that they had managed to stop them in the planning stages.