Ohio State police have made an arrest in the case of the threatening messages left on the Lantern Web site. They made the arrest Thursday at about 1:30 p.m.
Rahat Islam, an OSU student from Dublin, Ohio, posted comments online pretending to be Melissa Stredney and threatened "Virginia Tech all over again" after a story ran about Stredney getting fired from OSU. She was a teaching assistant in the chemistry department and encouraged her students to cheat and sent them threatening emails herself after she was confronted by her supervisor.
Islam, 18, is a freshman at OSU majoring in pharmaceutical sciences. Ohio State police Lt. Rick Green said that they were able to make the arrest after acquiring a subpoena to trace the IP address of the postings back to Islam's computer.
He is charged with false alarms and will have to go to court and face possible university sanctions, Green said.
"He is taking full accountability for his actions," Green said.
Molly Gray can be reached at gray.557@osu.edu
3 comments
"The comments posted by Islam, posing as Stredney, made visible threats to students in Stredney's class, as well as making reference to terrorizing OSU's campus "like Virginia Tech" shootings in 2007."Since he was falsely posting as Melissa Stredney, I don't think it matters if he was trying to be funny or not--the fake threats would have the same emotional effect on the intended "victims" and could be even more harmful to Ms Stredney, if they were taken to have been written from her. (Not that I have any sympathy for her, but since she did not make the threats, they shouldn't be attributed to her.)Also, obvious troll is obvious.