Man threatens to 'shoot up' Disney World if he gets enough 'likes' on his Facebook threat
A 23-year-old man from Brevard County in Florida was arrested after he threatened to "shoot up" Disney World in a Facebook chat on Tuesday, according to the sheriff's office.
The man, identified as Derek Eitel, in a group chat on Facebook wrote, "Five likes and I'll go shoot up Disney and hang myself," according to Eitel's affidavit.
The Brevard County Sheriff's Office said that the man was in a chat group with over 800 members when he made the threat. Fearing that he may shoot at the renowned entertainment complex, two of the members of the chat group reported his statement to authorities, according to Florida Today.
Eitel, in his interview with investigators, confessed to making the threat by typing out the statement on his smartphone.
Eitel, who lives in the 6600 block of Burning Tree Avenue, which is west of Interstate 95 and north of State Road 520, was reportedly charged with making written threats to kill or do bodily harm.
As of Wednesday, Either was being held in lieu of $100,000 bail at the Brevard County Jail, reports state.
One of the members, Kelly Maki, who reported Eitel to the authorities after reading his statement on the group chat, said that he only received one "like" on his statement and that "like" was from himself.
Maki added that she and a friend of hers reported Eitel to the polices. She said that others raised an alarm too when they saw his threat.
The 23-year-old had also posted a picture on his Facebook earlier this month which read "Better Off Gone."
Mass shootings in America have increased drastically over the recent years and have been declared as a public health emergency by the country's health monitoring organizations.
Latest reports state at least 31 people in the United States have been killed in school shootings so far in 2018 while 29 military service members died in the same period of time, according to an analysis of the Department of Defense data.
It is highly unusual for school shooting deaths to surpass military deaths in the US. In 2017, more than six times as many American service members had died than victims of school shootings, reports state.
According to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America had 38,658 gun deaths in 2016, including suicides.