Only In South Carolina ...

Last week I told y’all about the woman arrested in a South Carolina grocery store for dropping an F-bomb in the bread aisle, but this story makes that one seem almost sane.

On the first day of school in Summerville, South Carolina, Tuesday, Alex Stone completed a writing assignment on making fake Facebook status updates. Stone wrote about buying a gun and killing his neighbor's pet dinosaur.

Fake. He said:

"I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business."

Fake; but Sumerville High School officials were so concerned about him using a gun in a fake status update on a fake Facebook page that they immediately called police, who came sirens blaring, tracked down Alex, handcuffed him and arrested him.

A search of his backpack and locker was pointless; the fake gun wasn’t found. Still Alex Stone, who was doing what he was assigned to do — create a fake status for a Facebook page — was arrested for disorderly conduct for arguing with the police.

Karen Gray, Alex’s mother, was also stunned by the arrest:

"I could understand if they made him re-write it because he did have 'gun' in it. But a pet dinosaur? I mean, first of all, we don't have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he's not even old enough to buy a gun. … If the school would have called me and told me about the paper and asked me to come down and discussed everything and, at least, get his point-of-view on the way he meant it. I never heard from the school, never. They never called me."

Now, I understand a Zero Tolerance policy on guns in school but Alex Stone never said he had a gun in school; he wrote a fake status update saying he used a gun to kill a neighbor’s pet dinosaur and BAM arrested. Investigators say the teacher who assigned the writing exercise contacted school officials after seeing the message containing the words "gun" and "take care of business" and they notified the police.

Alex Stone was suspended for the rest of the week, but says he doesn't want to return to Summerville High; he now wants to be home-schooled.

Where, presumably, he can write a fictional account of dinosaurs and not be handcuffed for it.

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