Thursday, March 03, 2005

Have zombies taken over Clark County Kentucky?

I've been following this one as best I could all week. An 18 year old high school student, William Poole, has been charged with a felony count of "terroristic threatening" over [reportedly] a story he wrote in his private journal.

There has been very little media coverage, so we're pretty much stuck with what these few articles have said:

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/10982804.htm
http://www.winchestersun.com/articles/2005/02/24/local_news/news01.txt
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/state/10991368.htm
http://www.lex18.com/global/story.asp?s=2989614

The accused claims "..."It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

While the local police say:

"Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

...Pool was trying to "recruit a gang to take over the school," Detective Berl Perdue said.

"He didn't have a gang, but he was
attempting to organize one," Perdue said.

"No direct threats were made against named people, Winchester police Detective Steven Caudill said."


Shortly after reading about this on Monday I contacted the Kentucky ACLU, www.aclu-ky.org, the University of Kentucky ALCU, http://www.uky.edu/StudentOrgs/ACLU/, and the national level of the ACLU, www.aclu.org, to see if the Americal Civil Liberties Union had any comments.

So far the only response I've received is:

"Dear Mr. Raistrick,

Thank you for contacting the ACLU.

Our Web site (http://www.aclu.org) has a search feature located at the bottom
of the home page. By typing in a search request, you should find the latest
news, court briefings and archival information on this topic. You can also use
the Advanced Search available at http://www.aclu.org/News/AdvancedSearch.cfm ..."


Mind you, I had searched both manually and by engine to see if any commentary had been published. I've noted this to the ACLU contact that emailed me and asked again if they have any comments.

I also hunted around to see if the Kentucky court systems had any information regarding William's case online, but could only find the District Court dockets for the week (with no historical archives going back beyond "today").

If anyone has any more details on this case (or are willing to contact the courts directly to get copies of the public records), I'd love to hear about it.

There is also a comment on this site from someone who claims to be a student at this high school. He/she suggests that "..
it's no zombie story."

http://zerointelligence.net/archives/000347.php

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