A rural Minnesota community is reeling in the wake of a foiled plot by a local teen to bomb his high school and shoot students and teachers as they ran for cover.
John LaDue, 17, was hit with a stack of felony charges, including attempted murder and bomb possession, for the failed plan during which he sought to spill the blood of “as many students as he could,” authorities said.
During a press conference Thursday, Waseca Police Capt. Kris Markeson said LaDue was “fully prepared” to carry out the massacre at Waseca Junior and Senior High School and had amassed an arsenal of bombs, assault rifles, handguns and ammo, the Mankato Free Press reported.
A notebook detailing the plan showed how the wannabe mass-murderer planned to first kill his parents and then start a fire in a rural area outside of town to distract first responders.
Here’s how they caught him:
Officers nabbed the unhinged 11th-grader Tuesday after a tipster reported seeing LaDue skulking in and out of a storage unit where he kept many of his materials.
The caller, Chelsie Schellhas, told the Star-Tribune she was washing dishes in her kitchen when she spotted the teen lugging a backpack through her backyard headed toward the storage facility.
“He walked through the puddles when there was a perfectly good road he could have walked on,” she told the newspaper.
“It just didn’t seem right to me because we see people come and go with their trucks, and they don’t come on foot and cut through people’s back yards. It was like he was blatantly trying not to be seen.”
Schellhas said she called the cops after LaDue took a long time opening the unit, leading her to believe he was breaking in.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess what Schellhas saw wasn’t the only clue or warning sign.
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