A high school senior from Scottsburg High School in Scottsburg, Indiana faces a serious charge after he posted a violent video to his Facebook page.
Scott Small was arrested and arraigned on misdemeanor intimidation charges for posting a clip from The Walking Dead: Our World on social media. The game uses augmented reality to place zombies or “walkers” into the real world and allows users to shoot them as part of the game.
The clip shows the player using a shotgun to shoot zombies as they appear in the hallway of the high school. A screenshot from the video can be seen below.
WDRB
As you can see it does look similar to a school shooting, albeit the targets being virtual zombies rather than real people. A fellow student became frightened and concerned after seeing the video on Facebook and reported the post to the school principal, Ric Manns.
Manns and Scottsburg County Sheriff Joe Baker viewed the footage and said in an affidavit:
“depicted real Scottsburg High School students walking through the hallway along with fictional zombie characters…Such students could not be identified due to the app’s photographic settings..Further, it appeared Sean had used his smartphone to capture the movement of random students walking in the hallway of the school while shooting zombie characters walking in the shooter’s immediate direction.”
He now faces expulsion from the school and possible repercussions for his planned future in the US Army. Small had just gotten back from training for the Indiana National Guard at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Speaking to WDRB, Scott’s father Kris Small, had this to say:
“They made it sound like he had posted this awful video…they said he had created (computer-generated imagery) of students and was shooting students in the school hallway, and it wasn’t until I had a chance to actually look at it and I saw the logo in the corner and listened to it and heard the zombie sounds that I realized what it really was.”
If expelled, he would miss his senior year of high school and his final year on the school wrestling team. The expulsion hearing will take place next week.
