Girls arrested for making Sequatchie County hit list

The girls, ages 14 and 15, were taken to a juvenile facility in Cookeville after they were charged late Wednesday. A juvenile court detention hearing was set Friday on the charges in Dunlap, about 40 miles northwest of Chattanooga.

School Principal Tommy Layne said he initially considered it a joke when the list of about 300 names ? mostly students and faculty members but also celebrities Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey and the Energizer bunny ? was discovered in a classroom trash can.

That was “until they got on the Internet,” Layne said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Layne said he first learned about the list Tuesday when a “young man came in with his grandmother and said his name was on the list.”

Layne said there was no club or group involved and he described the girls as “friends” among the school’s more than 600 students.

“I think probably within the community there may be some confusion, that ?Oh my God these kids were fixing to come tomorrow with all these weapons.? That’s not the case,” Dunlap police chief Clint Huth said. “There was a threat,” but no evidence of weapons.

Huth said parents of some students at the school picked up their children early Wednesday as word of the investigation spread. He said efforts were being made to call parents of students whose names were on the list.

School attendance was slightly below normal Thursday, Layne said.

Huth said an investigation after the list was discovered led to students’ pages on MySpace, a social networking site on the Internet, and postings that included the word “kill.”

“In general terms, it was like, ?Let’s kill these people,'” Huth said. He declined to provide the specific wording on the Internet posting, which has since been removed.

“I am not saying we thwarted a shooting incident or an act of violence,” Huth said. “On the other hand, had this gone unchecked, down the road it could have grown into something a whole lot more serious than a list of names.”

Huth said that after investigators interviewed the students and met with a prosecutor, his office called parents and informed them the teens were being charged. He said parents brought the ninth-graders to the jail to be taken to the detention facility.

Huth described the girls as “very somber” when they arrived.

“They weren’t shouting mad or anything like that. There wasn’t a whole lot of emotion,” Huth said. He described the parents as “very concerned.”

Assistant District Attorney Steve Strain said there had been no discussion of charging the teens as adults. He said he would recommend that they be “evaluated” but declined to say if he would recommend that they remain in state custody.