A 14-year-old who was making plans to carry out a school shooting in Saskatoon will be under a terrorism peace bond for the next year.
Content on the girl’s TikTok account was flagged to the federal RCMP on Feb. 10, the same day eight people were killed in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
Police managed to identify the Saskatoon teen by the next morning. There was no apparent connection to the B.C. shooting other than the date.
Officers arrested her as she was being dropped off at school and charged her with one count of uttering threats.
In her locker, they found a “manifesto” with plans to attack students, and a hand-drawn map of her school. Police also searched her home. While they found some cardboard items that had been taped together to look like guns or explosives, they did not find any actual weapons.
The details about the case were outlined Wednesday in Saskatoon provincial court, where the teen consented to the terms of a terrorism peace bond, and the charge of uttering threats was withdrawn. She cannot be identified under the provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
“A peace bond provides intervention; it promotes rehabilitation, while also adequately protecting the public,” Crown prosecutor Kirsten Janis said in court.
The terms of the peace bond include that the teen must continue to attend counselling aimed at deradicalization and rehabilitation.
In addition, the teen’s online activity will be limited to certain devices that will be monitored by the RCMP via software that must be installed on the devices.
That will be a significant change from the conditions the teen had to abide by for the last two and a half months, which included that she couldn’t access the internet at all and that she had to be in the personal presence of her mother at all times.
Those conditions were imposed on March 30, when the teen was released into the custody of her mother after spending nearly seven weeks in a youth detention facility.
The teen’s lawyer, Aleida Oberholzer, said the peace bond conditions are aimed at keeping the community safe even after the term of the peace bond is complete (the maximum length of a peace bond is 12 months).
“This is a really important aspect of the peace bond … making sure that even beyond the 12-month peace bond, that this youth got the help that they needed so that this type of situation won’t happen again,” Oberholzer said.
“Even though I’m assuming this scare of being charged, and then going through the bail hearing process and this peace bond process, would be enough, I think in this case, the public would like to know that the youth is getting the help they need for the future as well.”
A second teen was arrested in Saskatoon on Feb. 11 and also charged with uttering threats. That teen was granted bail one week later, on Feb. 17, and that teen’s charge is still before the courts.
On Feb. 10, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism sent a bulletin to the RCMP flagging a TikTok account with posts showing an interest in committing a mass casualty attack at their school, Janis said in court. The FBI flagged the same account.
The account was part of an online community where fans “obsess over and glorify mass killers,” particularly the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.
Janis played a video made by an RCMP officer that captured the content in the account, which has since been deleted. One post had a selfie of the teen, accompanied by the text, “I wish TikTok was a school and I had a gun.”
On Feb. 2, the account posted a photo of a white t-shirt with the words “natural selection” and a black trench coat, which Janis noted were the same clothes worn by one of the Columbine shooters. The photo was captioned “fit for school tomorrow?”
The account owner later posted in the comments section, “nothing happens today, changed my mind, underprepared.”
Janis noted that in that post, other users commented wondering if they should report it.
Based on some items in the background on some of the posts, officers thought the account owner was likely in Saskatoon.
The RCMP contacted the Saskatoon Police Service’s safer schools program, asking them to circulate some images to try to identify the person making the posts.
On the morning of Feb. 11, a police analyst made a request to SaskTel for an IP address lookup, under provisions that allow for those requests in emergency circumstances. SaskTel provided the address of the home where the youth lived.
Around the same time, the Saskatoon Police Service’s school resource officer got a call from the safer schools co-ordinator indicating that the account user had been identified through someone recognizing their image, Janis said.
Officers stopped the teen’s mother as she pulled up to the school to drop off the teen, who was wearing a black trenchcoat similar to one worn by one of the Columbine shooters.
After listening to the Crown and defence lawyers, Judge Miguel Martinez addressed the teen directly.
Martinez was a judge based out of Meadow Lake in 2016, when four people were killed and seven others injured in a school shooting in the northwest community of La Loche, Sask.
“After, it was discovered that [the La Loche shooter] was looking on websites about the Columbine shootings and those sorts of things,” Martinez said, noting that in that case, the shooter had access to guns, and his online activity wasn’t noticed beforehand.
Martinez said he is satisfied that a peace bond is appropriate in this case.
“It’s to protect the public; it’s preventative, and it’s not very often that law enforcement or the justice system gets involved before something really bad happens,” he said.
“It’s also meant to support you … this is intended to help you get through a very difficult period, and to protect the public.”
