The senior says he sees the teacher as a friend, post was just ‘something to do’

Sheriff’s deputies arrested a 17-year-old Alsea high school student this week after he posted a message on the Internet saying he planned to kill his math teacher, the Benton County Sheriff’s Office said.

The student, a senior at Alsea High School, posted an animated counter on the social networking site MySpace.com. Beneath the graphic, which counts down days, hours and minutes, are the words, “Until I kill Mr. …” The math teacher’s name is included at the end of the sentence.

A sheriff’s office report said the teacher feared for his life after learning of the posting.

Deputies arrested the boy Monday in the school’s parking lot. He was taken to the Linn-Benton juvenile facility, then released.

Benton County District Attorney Scott Heiser said his office planned to file disorderly conduct charges against the boy Thursday evening.

The student, whose name was not released, has been unofficially suspended pending a psychological evaluation, said Jason Larson, the school’s principal. Larson said he learned of the threat after an anonymous tipster printed the Web page and left a copy in his office mailbox.

Since, Larson said, school officials have asked MySpace administrators to remove the posting. As of Thursday evening it was still accessible on the Web.

The student, who attends the rural kindergarten-through-12th-grade school of 151 students, also posted messages on his MySpace page saying he wants to die while “robbing a bank.” In addition, he wrote that he would like to meet Larry Phillips who, with a partner, robbed a North Hollywood, Calif., bank in 1997, then opened fire on the Los Angeles burgh with automatic weapons. Police killed Phillips in the shootout.

Several teenagers posted messages, apparently in response to the threat, on the student’s page. “The countdown you sent me basically rocks,” one wrote. Another said: “Your freakin’ comment about (the teacher) rocked my world!! I loved it.”

Undersheriff Diana Simpson said Thursday that it is still unclear what motivated the student to post the message.

“If people think it’s just a joke or it’s their way of a prank, it could have some pretty unfortunate consequences,” she said. “If the victim has a … feeling of being threatened, then we will investigate.”

The sheriff’s report described the student as “soft-spoken and withdrawn.” He admitted to deputies that he posted the threat, the report said. But he also said that he sees his teacher “as a friend.” Publishing the statement, he said, was just “something to do.”

MySpace provides personal Web pages where users, most of them teenagers and twenty-somethings, post photos, videos, music files and messages about themselves. With tens of millions of users, it is perhaps the most popular of online social networks, next to Xanga and Facebook, which is used by college students.

However, as the sites increase in popularity, police and school officials worry that young people are becoming vulnerable to sexual predators and identity thieves. MySpace announced this week that it hired a former prosecutor who fought Internet child exploitation for the U.S. Department of Justice to address the problems.

The sites also have given young people an opportunity to post troubling messages similar to the Alsea student’s.

Police questioned a Pennsylvania high school girl Wednesday after she posted a “hit list” including the names of 17 students on her MySpace page, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. And a Connecticut teenager was recently arrested after he posted threats against fellow students on a MySpace account.

“This is kind of a new frontier for education,” said Larson, the Alsea school principal. “Kids don’t really have a realization that they’re being watched.”