FRIGHTENING

Four Students Caught Planning Shooting on Columbine Anniversary, Cops Say

Two of the students were being charged as adults due to the gravity of the crime, officials in Pennsylvania said.

Four Pennsylvania high school students were arrested Friday for plotting to carry out a Columbine-style shooting on the 25th anniversary of the 1996 massacre, WBRE and WYOU reported. Two of the students at Dunmore High School—Zavier Lewis, 15, and Alyssa Kucharski, 15—are being charged as adults. Police said Kucharski had claimed to have made several explosives, including Molotov cocktails, and had planned to buy equipment to carry out the attacks. Authorities executed a search warrant on Kucharski’s home, where they found explosives, BB pellets, and notebooks describing how to make a bomb—and she was “obsessed” with the Columbine shooting, her mom told police. Kucharski told police she wasn’t sure why she had plotted the attack, which she and her friends planned to conduct under the name “Natural Born Killers.” “I just did it because that was on my mind at the time,” she said.

Lewis and Kucharski have both been charged with possessing weapons of mass destruction, terroristic threats, and criminal conspiracy, among other charges. “We are relieved that this plot was uncovered before anyone was hurt and urge anyone who has information about potential threats of school violence to contact police immediately,” Lackawanna County District Attorney Mark Powell said in a statement.