Omegle user claiming to be student posts SICK threat to shoot up Brooklyn high school and livestream it
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: A person who claimed to be a student posted a sick threat on social media, saying they would shoot up an elite high school in Brooklyn days after the deadly Uvalde massacre. “I’m going to shoot up my school Millennium Brooklyn High School New York with a MP15 assault rifle and a Glock 17 pistol with hundreds of rounds of ammunition in a few weeks and Livestream it on my Instagram,” the person wrote on Omegle last week. The person also said they would play “dancin military style and abba gimme gimme eurobeat” music during the shooting.
An NYPD spokeswoman said that an employee at the Park Slope school reported the threat to police. “We’re investigating it,” Detective Denise Maroni said. The disturbing post also said, "I hope to take at least 15-30 people with me mostly in the classrooms or hallways, plus some people fleeing the building." They said they would not surrender to police and would “shoot through the windows to get them and before I do it I’ll send a link to my stream to everyone.” The user even listed the names of more than a dozen students to be murdered.
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The building where the school is located contains many other schools. An employee from Park Slope Collegiate, also in the building, sent an email to parent following the threats. "Last night, an unknown person posted a threat to one of the schools on our campus, Millennium Brooklyn High School, on a site called Omegle," the email said. The post appears copy and pasted from social media threats that have been made in previous months to schools throughout our area, but it does include the school name and the names of some students. We are taking the threat seriously…”
Omegle is a free online chat website. Users do not need to register to use the service. It randomly pairs users in one-on-one chat sessions, where the users are known only as "You" and "Stranger" or "Stranger 1" and "Stranger 2". The site introduced a video conferencing feature in Marxh 2010.
Launched on March 25, 2009, the site was created by 18-year-old Leif K-Brooks of Brattleboro, Vermont. Before 2013, the site was criticized for not censoring contributions through a profanity filter. Users reported encountering nudity or sexual content on camera. Omegle implemented a "monitored" video chat after January 2013 to protect people under the age of 18 from harmful content.
Omegle is facing a $22 million lawsuit, filed in 2019, after a former user became victim of child sex exploitation. The 11-year-old plaintiff encountered a Canadian pedophile who blackmailed her into digital sexual slavery back in 2014. As per the lawsuit, Omegle knowingly allowed pairing minors with pedophiles due to a splash screen warning that said, “Predators have been known to use Omegle, so please be careful”. The warning has since been removed from the website.
A deadly massacre unfolded at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde on May 24 when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos barricaded himself inside a classroom and slaughtered 19 students and two teachers. Police faced sharp criticism for allegedly failing to stop the shooting quickly enough and come to the victims' rescue on time. Ramos was ultimately shot dead by an off-duty Customs and Border Protection agent from an elite tactical unit.
In another incident, Florida Police released a mugshot of a 5th grader who threatened to carry out a school shooting days after the deadly Uvalde massacre. Lee County Sheriff’s Office identified the boy as Daniel Issac Marquez, 10, a student at Patriot Elementary School in Cape Coral. He was handcuffed and walked into a police cruiser for his written threat. Defending publicly exposing the juvenile, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said that "a child pulling a trigger equals the same aftermath." Videos of the boy's arrest were also posted on social media by police.
Days after the Uvalde shooting, a 16-year-old boy was also arrested after threatening a mass shooting at a Long Island high school on social media. Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said that the boy was arrested for making a terroristic threat. He allegedly made an Instagram post on his 'Bellport Scholars' page, warning that there could be a shooting at Bellport High School the next day.