Wow, jail time?!
“Storytime of how my 13yo daughter (she’s now 14yo) ended up spending 3 nights in Juvie last spring and being charged with Felony Terrorism/Menacing, because of her cell phone and Instagram…
If you think it can’t happen to your kid/your family, you’re wrong…
I’ve been asked to tell this story a few times so I thought I’d make a post in hopes of helping another family avoid the trauma & stress/money/heartbreak. Sorry in advance for how long this is going to be… the details are so important because it shows that even when you’re in a good environment, have a really good relationship with your kid/their friends, good communication, small school, etc… Things can go really really badly, really quickly.
Let me preface by saying- my daughter is kind, sweet, caring, a good friend, does really well in school, obeys the rules (she’s actually a recovering people-pleaser), is respectful and respectable. She talks to me about so much of what goes on in her life, we have a very open-door policy on Communication about things. (My husband/her stepdad is also a licensed therapist which helps lol). Her friends often hang out at our house, they are all good kids and enjoy interacting with us as her parents/family. She attends a Private school and was in 8th grade at the time. She had an iPhone that I monitored randomly, and all seemed to be okay.
She had been bullied to some degree by one girl I called her “frenemy” (friend/enemy) in 7th and early 8th grade- someone who just kept drama and messiness stirred up between some of the kids, especially if this girl felt like she was being left-out… but we’d addressed things with the school, the admin had been involved off and on and it seemed like things were relatively leveled out. Anytime this girls’ name came up, we just told my daughter to avoid her, leave her alone, ignore her, move on, etc.
One Wednesday in April, my daughter was frustrated from dealing with this one girl. She was using my daughter’s name in a lie she was telling other kids, thinking that would make her story more believable. My daughter text her and told her to leave her alone, leave her name out of things and to stop trying to involve her in things. No biggie. I was around during the texts, my daughter was telling me about all of it. I didn’t think much of it.
Skip to Friday morning.
School starts at 8:00. About 9:40am, I get a phone call from the school Asst Principal that I needed to come to the school ASAP for a “parent conference” to handle a “social media issue”. My daughter only had Instagram and BeReal at the time. I’m friends with her on both, she rarely posts anything, I know all of who she Friends, I check who she’s Following, etc…
I asked if I needed to bring my husband, or my kiddo’s dad, with me and she said No, just me was totally fine.
So, apparently some time on Thursday evening, my daughter had posted a “Note” on Instagram, which only shows up inside of the Messages portion of the app, at the top of the screen. It’s not a Story, or a Post, or anything sent out or shown by just scrolling thru IG, even if you’re friends/followers of someone… it’s just like a random small spot to put a thought, in the Messages screen. The Note she put said something along the lines of “I’m just gonna hurt the next person who makes me mad”.
The girl who I referenced above, apparently saw that Note and took it to the school Admin before school, claiming that she was “scared” that my daughter was threatening her in it. (We later found out this SAME GIRL had done the SAME THING two years prior, in 6th grade, to another girl at the school there, over a TikTok post. She also sat in class that Monday morning, for an hour, right in front of my daughter, acting like nothing was wrong!)
Now for all anyone knew, that Note could have been about ANYONE. It could have been about ME because I made her clean her bathroom, or do the dishes that night, or whatever. Or her little brother for bugging her while she was playing on the XBox or something. It didn’t reference anything specific, it didn’t reference anyone at all, it didn’t reference any location, etc.
Now, was it appropriate for her to post? NOOO. Absolutely not. We’ve taught her that you cannot just say things on social media like you would in a conversation or things that could be misconstrued, and that social media/the internet is FOREVER.
Was it actually threatening? Also no.
Is it stuff that teenagers (and adults honestly) say all the time? Yes 1000%.
Would it be considered illegal? ……….. the day before, I’d have said No. This day??? ……..
Anyway, I get to the school, and my daughter’s father met me there because I called just to be like, uhm something weird is going on with our kiddo, and he was close by. (He’s also a former police officer… which matters momentarily.)
So we go into the Asst Principal’s office & there’s two plain-clothes cops and a uniformed cop, and our school’s Resource Officer sitting a table. And I’m like, oh this is weird.
We all sit down, with my daughter, and they start telling us that they are going to ask some questions about her Instagram account and other things, and that she has the right not to say anything, and we could get an attorney if we don’t want her to answer questions or speak with them… Basically reading her Miranda rights to her. And then they leave so we can decide what to do. I’m like- I have an attorney I can call! But her father says he doesn’t think it’s a big deal, just them covering their butt’s and that our daughter should just answer the questions honestly. (This was a bad/naive choice, we now know!!!!)
So we let her answer the questions. She point blank says that it wasn’t about anyone or anything specifically. That she would obviously never hurt anyone and she was just frustrated that evening. They asked her about the “drama” with the girl that happened this week, and she told them about it.
Anyway – the Resource Officer asked my daughter who could see the Note she posted and she said she had it set to “Close Friends” only so it wasn’t even her whole Instagram following (she doesn’t have a ton, I’m talking like maybe 150 people total). She said that her “Close Friends” list was like, maybe 70ish people?
So at this point, they said they were going to be arresting her for Terrorism/Menacing.
They said that because the “threat” was potentially able to be seen by more than XX # of people (I can’t remember what the threshold was for the #), that it was considered the “general public” and amounted to Felony level at that point.
We literally were completely blindsided. Even my ex, who was a cop, never saw this coming at all. I mentioned earlier, we are at a Private school, which is part of the church that we attend. My Mother In Law was a teacher there previously. We are not strangers or just random people to the Admin, by any stretch.
They said they’d have to take her in to the Juvenile Detention Center for processing, but that she’d be immediately released to me and we would have to come to court the next week. They also said she was suspended from school until the Admin could meet & decide if she was allowed to come back AT ALL. All this from a Private school, that we’ve paid SO MUCH $$ to attend, whom we KNOW the staff well, over this IG Note.
As if that alone weren’t bad enough, she gets to Juvie and her judge that she was assigned to, was out of town. The Judge that was temp assigned to handle his cases, WOULD NOT RELEASE HER to me until after court. This was Friday at lunch, and court wouldn’t be until Monday morning at 9:30am.
So at 3:30pm on Friday, I had to go in and see my 13yo daughter, who had COMPLETELY disassociated and mentally checked out/shut down, her dressed in an orange jumpsuit and ankle chains, in a glassed-in room, and tell her that I was trying my hardest to get her released but that in spite of 15+ people calling the Temp Judge directly and advocating for her… she was not being released to me.
THEN, showing up back to Juvie on Sat morning, with me knowing at that point that the Temp Judge was NOT budging… and being told they don’t allow visitors or phone calls all weekend long. Which we had no idea about (and she didn’t either- turns out she thought we were all so mad at her, that we just didn’t come back to see her or call her because of that )
She was released to me on Monday morning, after spending 3 nights in Juvie. And $5000+ later, we had an attorney who fought for us for 3 months before we were finally able to get an agreement with the DA’s office- they initially said they were going to drop/dismiss the entire thing, but then changed their minds We could have gone to a trial and fought it entirely, calling witnesses, etc… But that just seemed like more $ and trauma. So we decided to take a “plea deal” where she was charged with disturbing the peace, just a misdemeanor. But then the Judge chose to sentence her to 6months in jail (suspended), with 6 months of Probation with a 6pm curfew on weekdays and 8pm on weekends, and 60 hours of Community Service (suspended sentence meaning she didn’t have to spend time in jail as long as she met her Probation requirements). {Side note – I’ve seen people in our Parish commit ACTUAL crimes and get off with less of a sentence than she did.}
Anyway – this was a very very very HARD lesson for her and us to learn. We harp on our kids all the time to be mindful of what they say/text/post etc… And it’s one thing to TELL them- whether it’s in a text message or on social media- that it can haunt them or cause problems… but my daughter walked out the lesson in the flesh. And one positive thing that we can see came out of it- it taught her entire friend group the dangers of texting and social media posts in a way that us parents telling them NEVER would/could have.
[It also taught my daughter to have a HUGE distrust in those who are SUPPOSED to and claim to care about you (her school Admin), but that’s a whole different story/lesson.]”